Britain's golden age

HERE'S gold in them thar hills! Not enough to mine on an industrial scale. Not enough to spark a rush. Not even enough to make anyone rich. But there's gold in Britain's wilderness. And silver and precious gemstones, too.

- MIKE LOCKLEY

When we think of valuable commodities gathered from the UK's underground, we think of coal, iron ore, and non-ferrous metals such as copper and tin. We don't consider this crowded island harbours the shiny stuff so powerful it has created wealth and wars.

Yet it does. This week's Walk On The Wildside is an unexpected journey underground, a hunt for buried treasure.

Bronze Age prospectors were searching for gold nuggets here in 2000BC and using them for jewellery. They panned for it, they didn't dig it out.

And after the Romans invaded in AD43, they quickly began extracting the stuff.

But the UK gold industry did not die out in ancient times and, in fact, peaked during the late 1800s. The boom years were 1860 to 1909 when 3,500kg of the metal was mined.

When we consider the famous gold rushes, we think of the Californian frenzy that ran from 1848 to 1855, Klondike (1896 to 1899), and Western Australia (1885 to 1893).

But what about Dolgellau, a picturesque market town in north-west Wales that was at the centre of a UK rush in the 1860s?

The Dolgellau Belt was where you'd find the Clogau St David's and Gwynfynydd mines which provided gold for royal family wedding rings. Those two businesses produced 95% of the belt's gold.

Clogua St David's closed and re-opened many times before shutting for good in 1998. It could make a comeback after a new vein worth £700 million was discovered in 2020 close to the site.

Gwynfynydd yielded 45,000 troy ounces of gold before it closed in 1999. A pure kilogram of the metal was presented to Queen Elizabeth on her 60th birthday.

At the peak of the Welsh rush, there were 24 mines. The pandemonium was understandable: all gold is valuable, Welsh gold is more valuable than the rest - that's why our kings and queens wear it.