Birth of Britain 3of3 Gold Rush

the landscape around me has been shaped by ancient oceans and erupting volcanoes and ice ages but it's here down in the mud that the real treasures of Britain are buried coal led even tin have been pivotal in making Britain what it is today but there's one mineral that's mined right here that has captured the imagination of both men and women through the ages it's a mineral with all those magical qualities which doesn't tarnish it doesn't fade it's virtually indestructible what is it God Gold it underpinned our economies celebrates the pinnacle of our achievements and epitomizes the extremes of luxury and wealth in the past ten years prices have quadrupled making gold today one of the most sought-after metals on earth and what's even more surprising is Britain's gold heritage from ancient Celtic offerings to the gods to the wedding bands of modern royalty British gold has played its part Scotland - Devon Wales - Northern Ireland amazingly gold still lies hidden in the rocks and with Britain on the verge of a new Gold Rush I'm on a treasure hunt across the country and back in time looking to understand how the gold got here and how it continues to shape Britain's landscape and history gold has played an important role in Britain for over 4000 years it's even thought that the ancient Britons associated it's yellow gleam with the Rays of the Sun but those ancient Brits could have had no idea how closely linked gold and the Sun really are because billions of years ago gold was one of the heavy metals formed during the final moments of a dying star like our own Sun and the moment it exploded trillions and trillions of my new gold particles catapulted across the solar system so the question is how does gold get from being a newly formed element in a dying star to becoming a precious metal in the rocks of Britain the answer lies with the birth of the earth itself because after the spectacular demise of the ancient star the ejected gold particles became trapped inside Earth's newly forming rocks and while it may have taken millions of years it left the new earth literally peppered with gold but today nearly all of that precious load is locked deep in the Earth's core and scientists estimate that over 99% of the planet's gold that's billions and billions of tons is far beyond our grasp which is a bit of a pity really because if we could access it then we'd be able to coat the surface of the entire planet with one and a half feet of the stuff which would be quite pretty really but the reality is that most of it is so inaccessible that the amount of gold we can get hold of is tiny which raises the question how do we manage to find any at all but before I can go in search of Britain's gold and understand how its shaped Britain I first need to get a handle on the Titanic geological events that collected those tiny gold particles into my noble deposits my journey begins in Snowdonia Wales where the rugged landscape shaped by millions of years of violent volcanic activity hides the clues to the source of Britain's gold and my first stop is the Norway quarry in North Wales but I'm not looking for gold what I'm after is this a rock that's quite literally shaped the local landscape slate sometimes known as Wales is grey gold has played a crucial role in the local economy since Roman times and it was created in an earth-shattering geological event millions of years ago an event so huge and momentous it was responsible for the birth of Britain itself the event wasn't only responsible for shaping the Britain we know today but also for creating many of our gold deposits and to help me understand the scale of the forces at work I'd come to meet Cardiff University geologist hazel Pritchard whose infectious enthusiasm might have just got the better of her because it's not gold Hazel's got to show me but four hundred and fifty million year old fossil eyes sea creatures oh I've just found these these are grapdelites these things are actually in the slate yes whoo animal colonies first were in this branch structure these grapdelites are proof that this area was once an ancient ocean called the Iapetus and the slate was once a muddy sea floor that was turned into rock by the immense pressure exerted as two continents collided to turn mud into rock must have taken a phenomenal amount of force absolutely there were two continents there was England Wales and Scotland Ireland and they came together and they collided and the mudstone got squeezed and squashed and flattened to produce is amazing slate this continental car crash happened over 400 million years ago and the effect on the landscape is still obvious today but what about our gold has that been trapped deep in the earth way out of reach well a lot of it was but something happened during that great event which concentrated a lot of those rare gold particles into a place where later generations could find and mine them and to see that hazel and I are going further south come on pepper the closing of the Iapetus ocean may have left this area rich with slate but it gifted the rolling hills of South Wales with a much greater prize creating the perfect conditions to enrich the rocks with gold this is dollar coffee mine today a popular tourist attraction set deep in the command should countryside but over 2,000 years ago this was one of Britain's most productive gold mines although before I can see any evidence of that hazel is itching to show me the effect the colliding continents had on the local rocks cool stunning is that yeah they're really spectacular folds these are the sediments that were laid down in Iapetus the muddy shales became slates in the quarry and now they've been folded into these magnificent folds how long do you think this whole event would have taken oh tens of millions of years as I'm still struggling to fully understand how solid rock can end up folded like paper hazel has conveniently organized a little demo which simulates the effect of the two ancient continents colliding and while this does feel a bit more like cookery than geology she seems confident it'll work she called the machine that conducts this experiment it's a squeeze box a squeeze box oh that's what I'm gonna call ran away so this is simulating what happened 400 odd million years ago yes when the two continents collided and these horizontal rocks were deformed into what we have above us so we've only got two layers here but they represent all that hundreds of layers that are above our heads yes okay what do we do next squeezing well I'll do that so the mountains are building these two huge continents are colliding and these horizontal settlements are being folded and fulfilled and raised into a large mountain and it's a process that would have been a million times bigger insane two million times longer oh yes just like the Himalayas today which is still rising slowly and here rising slowly look Rick you really wanted to see this to new yes well double fold every tyke folds just like the ones we have here in Donna coffee that's extraordinary you've got exactly the same process going on down there as you had there but what we're interested in isn't the folds themselves but the cracks that formed when the rocks fold it over and to look at those we need to go in there this cramped wet tunnel called an adit is just one of dozens that riddle this mine extending for several hundred feet into the hillside it provides a unique insight into the processes that brought the gold to the surface and this yellowish staining is a sign we're on the right track as this is the residue of a superheated fluid a sort of mineral soup that found its way up here from deep within the Earth's crust over 400 million years ago the fluids would have been five kilometres down early percolated up through the folded rocks precipitating minerals and altered the rocks so does this mean there could be gold nearby absolutely and if you look over here you can seem a tunnel yeah and you can see some veins that we should go and look at and this white rock is what we've been looking for a vein of quartz this wooden precipitated by the hot fluids which would have been silica rich deposited the quartz but they would have also contain iron arsenic and gold so where all those sedimentary rocks outside were folded there would have been cracks and they'd have been a crack here and through it all this hot liquid would have come bearing lots of different sorts of metals yes exactly including gold yes but where is it I hear you ask well the slightly disappointing thing is that in many cases gold is actually invisible to the naked eye made up of particles so tiny you could fit about 200 on a pinhead but believe me it's there and this is our first tantalizing glimpse of British gold and there you have it invisible gold trapped inside rock-hard quartz veins buried deep underground and things stayed that way around here for hundreds of millions of years until that is an invasion by a ruthless and ingenious civilization just over two thousand years ago who would stop at nothing to get it Britain's gold I'm in South Wales in search of Britain's gold Welsh gold is considered particularly special for centuries it was worn by early kings and princes even today it's still used for the wedding bands of many members of the modern royal family like much of britain's gold it was injected into the Earth's crust about four hundred million years ago the result of a huge tectonic clash that also shaped the islands we live on well you have to fast forward a couple of hundred million years before it begins to be found and used by us humans and just like the noble art of fishing hunting for gold is all about knowing where to look and it was an invading army of Romans who not only discovered the huge amount of gold that there was around here in dolaucothi but came up with a very clever idea for getting at it by using this the river coffee by harnessing the river the Romans had a source of almost unlimited power allowing them to exploit the rich pickings that lay just beneath their feet but with the river over seven miles away from the mine I've returned $2 coffee to meet mining engineer and Roman expert Edie Percy to find out just how they did it when did the Romans arrived here for they arrived in we think about 74 AD and they're here for a Fiat of 50 years around 126 ad they abandon this base after that we don't exactly know what happens but it's only a very short occupation really about 50 years how did they use water in order to do the mine well a lot of it you'll see you if you like I'm above you here there's these banks here that's a water tank where they were holding water bringing it from the start of the coffee seven and a half miles away up to the valley there the Romans diverted the river by building a complex network of aqueducts or leets they then used the stored water to expose the goldrich veins of quartz with a process called hashing you burn the topsoil off take away all the trees and then release a large quantity of water it strips the rock bare exposing the veins view to follow down how much water 2.6 million gallons every single day that must have completely rips up the landscape I would have been a massive industrial Scot none of the trees you see here now would have been a huge blot on the landscape the use of water of mining gold was revolutionary and its legacy has endured for millennia hydraulic mining which uses high-pressure water jets fueled the California gold rushes in the 19th century and it's still used today to mine the mineral kaolinite here in Britain two and a half million gallons of water gushing down the hill can you imagine it must have been an awesome sight but they didn't stop when they'd exhausted the goldrich veins on the surface no they started to dig this is an original roman tunnel called and add it there coming up you notice how square this tunnel is dug by hand over 2,000 years ago it extends for hundreds of feet into the hillside you look at the city you can actually see the strike marks left 2,000 years ago by the miners fantastic another word but as impressive as the entrance is it pales compared to this that's massive endure it is absolutely massive chamber of quartz has been here and they've mined this huge area wrote as a honeycomb of workings in this area but they didn't have explosives so how earth did they get all the rock out there's several through there's a technique called fire setting where you set a fire against the rock make it white-hot douse it with water it shatters with explosive force with the or extracted the rocks were crushed with the aid of heavy water powered hammers and the gold was finally separated by panning smelted into ingots the gold from these Welsh Hills was instrumental in helping pay for Rome's expanding Empire it's pre mind-boggling to try and imagine how much work must have gone into extracting all the gold from this place 2,000 years ago particularly as they didn't have any modern machinery or high explosives look at this lot in order to extract one ounce of gold the Romans would have had to have removed all this probably more it's been estimated that they took about one and a half tons of gold and in order to do that that have had to have shifted the equivalent of five and a half million of these trucks of rock the Romans abandoned the dollar kotti mine after about fifty years and despite a brief revival in the 19th and 20th centuries no one has ever found anywhere near as much gold there again it seems that the Romans knew so much about the local geology that they'd pretty much exhausted the entire deposit but while the Romans had to work hard for their gold sometimes nature takes a hand and the gold comes to you by of the geology I'm heading north of the border to the southern uplands where just like in South Wales the events of 400 million years ago created the perfect conditions to deposit a bounty of precious minerals welcome to one Lochhead is not only Scotland's highest village but its slap-bang in the middle of an area known as God's treasure house it's an area that's rich with copper and lead and zinc and there's certainly a lot of evidence of lead mining around here but it's very gold to answer that I'm meeting geologist Rob Chapman so this is it is it this is our place although unlike in Wales we won't be looking underground as the gold found here is mostly underwater as we're looking for what's known as placer gold which refers not to the type of gold but rather where it's found in this case that's in the gravel and stones on the bed of this river because it's very dense it sinks down to the bottom yeah so we're looking in crevices and crannies where the gold can get in once it's in it doesn't get out so as long as it can get down right down to the stream bed and let the gravel from there then we should be milling with a chancel sound simple enough and armed with this oversized bike pump what could go wrong yeah it just comes out again give it a bit of a tug yeah and then it hmm easy when you know how I suppose I was feeling a bit of an idiot absolute moment the gold originates from quartz veins somewhere in the hills and through the process of erosion it's found its way into the river so with a bit of luck it's not just a pan full of stones I've got here but some flecks of gold - I thought I saw something glistening it was just the sunlight not quite excited for a moment but I should know by now finding gold isn't that easy and I've still got a little work to do yet I'll tell you what I'm working up a bit of a sweat I must admit how do you do this pan underneath the water yep side to side everything moves everything moves not just the top bit everything let this heavy gold sink to the bottom of the pan yeah I've seen it in movies I thought it was just a cliche I didn't realize it actually did anything all my heavy stuff seems to salt to the top all this swishing and swirling is in effect just replicating the action of the river the heavier gold tumbles along the riverbed until it reaches karma slower water where it drops out of the stream and settles to the bottom so the gold that we're panning for here comes from gold-bearing quartz somewhere up in those mountains there and it gets eroded by glassier action and by the rivers and comes down the river in little bits NIT lodges in in crevices and in the bends of the rivers in fact the prospectors say you find gold where the water falls but the perspectives make any money otherwise no there's just not enough around tonus the other husband in the passes and a few blue gold rushes incident in scotland but this isn't enough to sustain a personal generate thinking okay well I'm not sure I'll be packing up the day job I do seem to be getting the hang of this well that's it oh yeah definitely yeah I'm rocking to see you sorted with that okay hello I know if there's any gold in here you have to try too hard cuz but they'll pay really yeah you're not winding me out no I'm not one yeah post assault no I've actually got a bit of gold and don't think that is gonna make my fortune but it sort of makes it all worthwhile always thinking these kind of demonstrations no one ever finds anything I have gold gold in some cases they're rigged but this one wasn't no I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams but it's about the size of a blackhead there is this is back-breaking work but it is a skill worth preserving because planning like this is just about the simplest way of finding gold mine I'm not sure my little bit is going to add much to Britain's gold reserves while I may not have found much gold over the years Rob's expertise has paid him off much more handsomely once in a lifetime nugget from this early at today's prices this nugget would fetch Rob several hundred pounds but I can tell it's worth much more to him than money what did you feel when he found that I thought it was a piece of quartz it was too big to be a Peterbilt that's great no it's daft isn't it there are only minerals but we're like kids with this stuff it's quite a tactile stuff nothing else is quite that heavy today is just enthusiastic amateurs who carry out most of the gold prospecting here but over 400 miles to the south at the other end of Britain the local geology has created a deposit that's so valuable and so unusual that it's fueled a new breed of much more determined gold hunters isn't that stunning it's got to be one of my favorite coastlines in the whole of Britain but even though it doesn't seem to have very much in common with the gold-bearing sites in Wales and Scotland because of its unique geology this part of devon produces gold that's so rare and so beautiful it's worth more than its weight in gold and that's actually true known as dendritic gold it takes this beautifully delicate crystalline form as one of the rarest formations of gold pieces like this in its raw state are highly collectible and worth thousands of pounds and just like the Devon coastline the gold stunning beauty is all thanks to the area's unique geology it was first discovered in the early part of the 20th century and made famous by the distinguished mineralogist Sir Arthur Russell the gold here in Devon just like in Wales and Scotland was formed when hot gold rich fluids percolated up cracks in the limestone rock but while the process may be the same the event that triggered the formation is very different occurring some 100 million years after the closing of the Iapetus it blessed Devon with not only this unique gold but also its trademark coastline I'm here to find out what happened and what measures are currently being undertaken to protect one of Devon's most desirable treasures and for this part of the trip I'm going to need my sea legs I'm joining mineralogist Alan Hart from London's Natural History Museum on the short trip to a small rocky outcrop known as hopes nose it's here Alan's spent the last year and a half studying the gold and it's linked to the Devon geology we've been working really hard on hope snows to try and ascertain how did he paws it formed you know it's unique in Britain but it's unique almost globally there's only five or six other types deposit where these minerals occur arriving at hope snows we're surrounded by towering walls of Devon's signature limestone as a sedimentary rock the limestone began life just like the slate on the bottom of an ancient sea but this rock isn't compressed mud it's the remnants of trillions of tiny sea creatures when they died a calcium carbonate shells sent to the sea floor and they over eons they cemented together and that built up the layers that we see in these rocks and so what you see here is a look back in time that the marine fauna that lives on 390 million years ago judging by the fossil record it was a very different sea from today's chilly English Channel so if you look here honey oh well that is incredible a fantastic fossilized sea floor these were all sea creatures yeah you can see these these are remnants of corals that once flourished in the warm oceans it's exciting it looks as though you ought to be able to pull them along with your fingers but they really are part of the rock on there it just stretches all the way long all the way all the way along here it's really spectacular this evidence paints a picture of an idyllic scene warm shallow seas beautiful corals and an abundance of marine life but round about 300 million years ago this tranquil scene came to an end when a supercontinent which we now call Pangaea was born there was no English channel back then so what we now call northern France just smashed into what's now southern England and the warm ocean thrusts up huge mountains this not only created the southwest coast which we know and love but it also started the process whereby hot goldrich fluids ease their way into fissures in the limestone and through this process Devin's unique gold was born this process known as seismic pumping continued for millions of years bringing more and more gold to the surface but what I want to know is why the gold occurs in its distinctive fern-like formation rather than just as a lump or a nugget the gold was crystallized very very quickly if you imagine it's a very cold one in your car and you put the water on the windscreen it suddenly becomes fern lights very fast that's exactly what happens with the gold here the fluids are enriched in gold come to the horizon they suddenly called and they've done exactly the same thing they just turned into firm life forms just like at the mine in Wales the gold here is virtually invisible to the naked eye trapped in veins of rock-hard calcite it's only when the rocks dissolved away with the strong acid that the full beauty of Devon's gold is revealed this is so exquisite is one of Russell's original specimens as you can imagine this is worth thousands of pounds now and when people first heard that there was gold at Hope snows there was a sort of mini gold rush but you can't dig a gold mine here so people started improvising than that they used rock peaks hammers as you can see here this is Russell's original vein yeah the specimens from and someone's come down afterwards with a big drill try to extract some more of it so the whole rock face is under threat now yeah absolutely we what we trying to do now with this deposit is to try to rescue what there is here for the National collection so we can research how the gold was actually formed for Alan and his team today is the culmination of over 18 months work as they're about to extract one of the last known specimens of gold so for the past year and a half we've been on our hands and knees for hours a day of hanlin's is looking for gold trying to ascertain if there's any gold left on the deposits you hide in it yes we have if I skip over here yeah I can show you that this small black spots this men rib here yeah is actually native gold in calcite so forgive your hand lens hopefully you'll be able to look at that closely anywhere to see one of the early if you pray places in the UK you can see gold actually Institute in the Rock know how anyone could possibly identify that with a naked eye it once you get your eye and once you can see it it's very easy to do we don't really know whether it's just a small blip at the surface or whether the gold actually goes deeper than that and it's actually a very large sort of pod type deposit that's really tantalizing isn't it yeah absolutely so it could be absolutely minut or that might be just one thousandth of it it's amazing to think that this gold has been locked into these rocks for over 300 million years yet with the aid of a diamond-tipped chainsaw it's free in about three minutes but I can't deny I am a little disappointed because to me it still looks like a bit of rock though Alan seems pleased enough it's fantastic is it you always have this romantic view the are I'm gonna take the rock out it'd be these fantastic girls but in reality the gold is locked up inside the calcite itself when the rocks finally dissolved away Alan's hoping that this is what will be revealed stunningly beautiful almost magical gold that's been locked into the Devon rocks for millennia even then this will be just the start of his investigations the whole point about this extraction was not only to preserve the gold but to look at the mineralogy as a whole we can look at the the sort of fluid that formed the gold we can do some geochemical work and hopefully that will shed more light on how this unique deposit was formed so no more gold but plenty of geology left absolutely yes the gold we found today will be preserved by the Natural History Museum for the nation all but I should tell you that the deposit here is virtually exhausted so please don't come roaring down with your rock sores and your explosives but as the price of gold soars so prospectors are on the lookout for fresh deposits and Britain is on the verge of a new highly lucrative Gold Rush so for my final leg I've come here to the hills of northern island island has a long tradition of gold which may date back over four thousand years many think these early Bronze Age artifacts are made with gold that was found here but my journey is bringing me bang up to date with a modern gold rush that looks set to turn the Emerald Isle gold it wasn't until the 1960s that scientists finally figured out that it was something called plate tectonics that had shaped our planet the theory said that all the Earth's continents had moved slowly across the face of the earth colliding and splitting throughout geologic time they then went on to figure out that if northern island had once been joined to a goldrich part of North America around Newfoundland and as the rocks in both places were the same then if there was gold in North America why not here I've come to the coronoid prospects near OMA to meet a man who's been hunting for gold here since the early 80s his search has seen him scour every inch of these hills Garth Earl's is a senior geologist of the northern islands Geological Survey and it was in this slippery stream that he and a colleague made an exciting discovery Garth wasn't panning for gold he was looking for something much more surprising rust enough material is is probably caused by the occurrence of the minerals of contained gold but specifically what minerals known as fool's gold so some places where we see this particular iron oxidations iron material we can sort of figure that this might be a good place to look hopefully you can see some of the fools gold oh yeah I can see that with my naked eye yeah fool's gold is the nickname of the common mineral iron pyrite 'yes and what it looks like real gold oh yeah yes it's full of isn't it it is often it's a worthless dead end for prospectors but Garth discovered that in this deposit the fool's gold occurred along with the real stuff so it could lead him to a bonanza the more pyrite that's present in this rock the more gold is present also so they might even beat onions and thanks to Feldon old Aurora so what do I do with this well you can keep it you can throw it away seems a bit want and there's gold in it although God's cavalier attitude may be well-founded because he discovered something else he noticed that this stream seemed to bend and meander in a number of places and wherever it did he found veins of quartz loaded with both fool's gold and real gold stream can't break through it country will pass this and it follows it for a bite maybe fifteen or twenty meters and then it changes direction again so if you look at this on a map you will see the stream has got these meanders and every one of these meanders turns out to be associated with the golden rocks so this is the big place this is where you first knew that you're on the money bin take this and crush it down as very rich pretends very high levels of gold so in here there is actually gold that was found in an Irish stream correct it's very exciting isn't it it is and that's the same boses prospectors and geologists we get whenever we find something like this this is what we spend our time looking for and to be successful and find it gives us a real kick but of course just because they found the course veins that didn't mean that a mining company was something to stump up the millions of pounds that would be required for a major mining operation in order to get that kind of evidence they needed to go underground this way yeah down the stream this exploratory tunnel or adit was dug as the result of Garth's findings running directly under the stream it extends deep into the hillside this tells a huge piece of engineering why was it necessary because we needed to prove that the VINs were continuous here we're actually travelling along the vin and we can see that as well mineralized we can see that it's continuous and that gives us a lot of confidence and just along there you can see that the vin is almost all made up of iron pyrite this sulphide that contains the real gold some people this is that yeah the bends just over a metre wide here and the grade is exceptionally high I mean this this material contains over 10 ounces of gold per ton of rock but as the old saying goes all that glitters is not gold so as pretty as this is the shiny stuff is the worthless fool's gold the real gold is invisible to the naked eye microscopic particles 20 microns across that's about 1/8 the width of a human hair so any mining operation would need to first extract and then crush up the rocks to create this gold dust it's a huge amount of work but it looks like the rewards might be worth it this rock contains about $10,000 worth of gold and the mine manager said to me that anyone can have it provided they can take it away which is very generous except it weighs the best part of a ton I'll come back for it later in fact Garth and his team have estimated that in this hillside alone there's at least an incredible 600,000 ounces of gold which at today's prices is worth about half a billion pounds but mixing my metaphors even that's probably just the tip of the iceberg the information is that the resource of six hundred thousand answers is in the central portion of this mob but you've got an enormous number of other vines over there over here down there yeah there's over 30 vans we discovered the resource itself was only best in six or seven of these as well as up this area here is a lot of potential this area here and on to the size also do you think there could be as much gold there there and there is this seems to be here yes there's every reason to believe that if the serum Waddle work is successful in the west and the south on the east but that six hundred thousand answers can be significantly increased that would be an awful lot of gold in one hillside this potential bonanza led to Northern Ireland becoming the most widely surveyed country on the planet called the Telus project for three years every inch of Northern Ireland was studied from the ground and from the air what it revealed was this a kind of treasure map for the 21st century with the darker areas or bull's eyes identifying the locations richest in gold but deciding where to dig is a difficult and expensive process as the grade of gold and type of terrain dictates the method of mining to date only one location has been granted the license to dig and with the potential of a massive 14 tons of gold hidden in the deposit it's no surprise that the diggers and haul trucks are already hard at work in search of microscopic gold my journey to unearth Britain's gold has taken me the length and breadth of the country and this is my final stop a large hole in the ground deep in rural Northern Ireland this is kavanah core Britain's newest and only working gold mine and all right a great big hole in the ground isn't everyone's choice for a visit but this is where our story comes to a fruition because although my search for gold is over nature doesn't give up its treasures that easily how on earth do you mind something you can't even see the answer is a multi-million pound operation burrowing deep into the landscape but there are no tunnels here as this is an open cast mine and they have to dig a hole this large just to get a vein of gold-bearing quartz a few feet wide Nick Hardy is the man in charge how much Rock DF we need to shift round about 60 70 tons of rock to get a ton of all material how much gold will you get out of that one ton of all are all that we delivered to the mills running around about 7 grams per ton and what can you do with that 7 grams of gold for 18 karat gold wedding-ring so that 60 tons of rock to make one wedding ring that's right extracting the ore is just part of the process as the precious invisible gold still needs separating and to do that involves a lot of industrial crushing smashing and finally bubbling through these flotation tanks which use the Gold's hydrophobic or water hating properties to separate the gold particles from the other minerals and when it's all done they get this a bag of purest grey what's in there was a mixture of minerals just as it was in the vein but in a more concentrated form pyrite in its various forms LEDs and gold and silver these bags are destined for Canada where the gold will finally be separated but to test the purity and grade of what they mine the guys here carry out a test called a fire assay fire assay means trial by fire a pretty appropriate name because this furnace is over 1,100 degrees centigrade as dangerous as this test is it's vital because not only does it determine the purity of the gold and therefore how much the mine gets paid but it's also the only time they ever get to see their gold here at the mine so there you have it pure British gold more than 400 million years in the making and now fueling a new gold rush since operations began the mines extracted over 15,000 troy ounces of gold which at today's prices is well in excess of a hundred million pounds but not all the Gold's exported some of it's used to create their own brand of jewelry jewellery made with rare pure British gold just as the ancient Celts are thought to have done over 4,000 years ago from fiery origins in an ancient Sun formed by millions of years of violent tectonic forces searched for by hopeful prospectors for millennia gold is one of Britain's true treasures and despite the earth not giving it up easily this magical indestructible metal has shaped our landscape our economy and our history ever since the birth of Britain itself

Channel: Reijer Zaaijer

Views: 469,118

Rating: 4.7339406 out of 5

Keywords: time, team, full, episodes, season

Id: oQaT6IVIzs0

Length: 44min 57sec (2697 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 07 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Boredguy32]

Gold Rush Glory Hole: Journey to Middle Earth

[u/aarkwilde]

Pave the earth!

[u/Landlubber77]

Like making double decker brownies.