Did the UK have a source of mercury.....

apart from some savages in the colonies....

Did the UK have a source of mercury.....

apart from some savages in the colonies....

All imported; Spain, Austria, Italy, USA (California & Texas), Mexico, China, Russia were major suppliers rather than UK colonies. Cinnabar, HgS (often accompanied by droplets of native mercury) was the only commercially important ore.

Stuey

I have cinnabar with gold from the Ochils - I forget the name of the river - no doubt someone will enlighten us - near a castle with a bar in the dungeons.. fantastic gold there - I got nearly an ounce in a few hours... not sure what its like now.

Manicminer is right - it was all below the old mill site - must still be loads there - I even found it in gravels below the Tyn y Groes hotel and thats a fair way from the mine..

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I see I will have to set the record straight here. Yes, I was one of the panners on the Wen, (I was a greenhorn in March 2009 when I had a brief course) but I was also blamed on a different forum for what several others had done. I wasn't there for 10 months straight, but from late March to mid June then a few weeks at a time until April this year. In this time I was visited by several EA officers after repeated complaints by a retired EA officer, and they never found any problem with me or the various panners who I was happy to invite to join in. I dug small holes and backfilled, though several others were digging big holes just above and below the bridge and didn't fill them in, using winches. I don't see a big problem with that, but I was blamed.
One professional panner and a geologist also praised my technique, so I thought I was following the rules. No one ever suggested that I was mining, and no official ever asked me to leave. The area I was in is access land, and I believed I was exercising my right to pan as a form of open air recreation. It seems to me that a few other panners are using the CCW's flawed approach to have a dig at me, whilst forgetting about the other panners who did the real damage. Over the years, a number of panners have been digging in the banks, using machines and mining in less visible spots. A few oldies are obviously annoyed that their secretive practices have been curtailed, and they like to put that down to me for working in the open. However, if I had done anything extreme, the CCW and forestry could have taken action against me individually. If the entire Wen and Mawddach are justifiably SSSIs and there is evidence that moving gravel could possibly damage any habitat, there should perhaps have been no panning there. However, CCW has no firm eco data to back up its 'sledgehammer', ie the signs banning panning, which are simply a threat of legal action. Any criminal case based on pearl mussels which don't exist on the Wen or Mawddach would fall apart, so the whole story is a con. CCW may even have misled police about the situation.
Panners should put their heads together and challenge the CCW to explain its knee jerk reaction, or they will be intimidated individually. I believe that Manic's comments were based on what others had told him, but this has led to misunderstanding of the situation by a few others who simply don't understand what had really happened. CCW and forestry plan to reintroduce panning at some point, initially they wanted to limit us to a trowel and pan, which would be as effective as a ban. However, having discussed the situation with a few officials more recently, they are willing to compromise. I just hope that the main panning association (whose members are mainly in Scotland) doesn't undermine our potentially strong negotiation position in Wales by going along with the exaggerated and even false stories of damage. With government cutbacks, police CCW and forestry may find their staff culled, so this whole exercise may have been a sabre wrattling exercise, to justify fairly ineffective jobs. Oh yes, perhaps CCW should prosecute the FC for the massive clear felling, which will lead to further silting up of the estuary. Dolgellau used to be a ship building town, so the entire estuary could justifiably be dredged. Bring in Rio Tinto, or set up a local dredging firm to make Dolgellau a rich town once again? Discuss.

Glen Devon - cinnabar and two types of gold, one with a high percentage of silver (>60%) and the other low silver (<10%). Can still pan gold from the burn but need landowners permission.

Mercury also imported from Slovenia mines at Istrija owned by a British company in the 1880's.

Thats the one! The guys in the BGS geochem dept gave me info about the place - who was it leased by ???? I met the landowner and he was very accommodating - only let me pan for a day, but boy - was there some gold there.. Must have been about 1990 from memory.

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Irish Company called Navan Resouces plc had the Glen Devon Licence from the Crown Agent in the late 1990's and also had various land owner agreements over the area. They ran a small Knelson (6" diametre) (centrifugial concentrator on a prospecting trailer) in Glen Devon and over the watershed to the north. Biggest piece of gold was pea sized and was recovered from a seive ! Do not think a bedrock source was identified although I believe an epithermal source was inferred possibly contemporaneous to the Rhynie Chert much further north in Aberdeenshire in the Devonian Old Red Sandstones.

Borland Glen is a fascinating prospect.

Worked there as a student volunteer for BGS in the late 1980s. Afterwards did some recreational panning giving the farmer a cut of the finds each time. Had several gram-sized nuggets with a lot of coarse flakes including hollow 6-sided tubes that had clearly not traveled far. BGS had those. Most nuggets had some quartz associated under magnification. Most of the gold I collected was high-fineness but occasional flakes of lemon-yellow electrum were also found along with abundant cinnabar, barite and botryoidal hematite. However, there was no evidence that these minerals had been associated in situ (it would have been an unusual assemblage had that been the case!)

Several years later after the occurrence had been published I returned to find I couldn't recognise the place, so much digging had gone on!

My suspicion based on the textures observed in gold grains was that it was a drusy open space-fill deposit, perhaps related to the localised but coarse grained and rich Alva silver occurrence not a million miles away. Unfortunately, a small but very rich bonanza of this type could prove hard to locate due to the major drift coverage over much of the area and the weathered, regolithic nature of the bedrock - the latter making it very difficult to tell if a Pionjar sampling tube was at rock-head or a metre below! Very close-spaced deep overburden sampling on a 10x10m grid might help - if I remember rightly the BGS sampling lines were 50 or 100m apart. We did find a major zone of intense pyritisation, but it's entirely possible that it is unrelated to any bedrock gold mineralisation!

Cheers - John

We all know that there are no Mussles on the Wen and especially the Mawddach. The water purity is not good enough. 3 weekends back the Ph was measured at 5.5, the freshwater pearl mussle requires the absolute minimum of 6.5 for sustainability. The higher the acidity the more damage to the calcium shell of the mussle causing a stunted growth.
The acidity is leaching from the munitions dump above the Gain and consequently the water has been polluted for half a century.No fisheries in their right mind would want to (re) introduce mussles here, its stupidity.

The mussel-beds are on the Eden.

The acidity of the Wen & Mawddach are less to do with the Ranges and more to do with the facts that a) both rivers receive acid mine drainage, b) the Wen cuts straight through a porphyry-copper deposit and the drift along its banks contains percentage levels of pyrite and c) both catchments drain acid moorland.

Anyway, whatever the minutiae, Forestry Commission Wales have confirmed to me that they have issued a Directive than prohibits panning on all the land they manage. They have had enough.

Cheers - John