Tuesday 8th June 2010 - Pumsaint

I suspect that many of you fancy the idea of panning for gold and making your fortune by finding some huge nuggets. Well, today I had the chance.
Opposite the campsite is the National Trust owned Dolaucothi Gold Mine and we walked over to it at the rather late opening time of 11:00. Entry is free for National Trust members but everyone has to pay for the guided tours of which there are two – the Victorian and the Roman. We chose the Roman tour as that was our main interest. We had to wait until 12:30 for that to start but this gave us time to walk around the more modern surface buildings and exhibitions. We were also able to do some do some gold panning. We managed to find lots of small pieces of fool's gold and I found a tiny flake of gold that was just the colour that we were told to expect. This was later identified as a piece of gold tinsel, almost certainly from the children's room where they were encouraged to make gold objects! I obviously was not going to make my fortune panning for gold here.
The tour took us up the hill to the higher levels of the gold mine where the Roman shafts had not been destroyed by later mining. The Roman mining was all done by the drift method i.e. it was possible to walk into all of the shafts from the hillside. However they still ended up deep under the hill and needed a series of foot-operated waterwheels to drain the mine shafts. We went into a few of the Roman shafts observing the classic Roman coffin-shaped cut through the rock and the marks of the Roman tools of the roof. The gold ore is held within the seams of quartz running through the shale, so the mining technique is to follow the quartz seams wherever they go. Extracting the gold is very difficult. The quartz has to be ground down to a fine powder and then water is used to flush away the quartz leaving the gold trapped in a fleece or vegetation on the bottom of the washing table. Burning the fleece or vegetation leaves the gold to be collected. We even shown a section of the side of the hill that has been identified as the three-tier crushing and washing area used by the Romans. The Romans targeted this area for its gold, something they had learned about before the invasion and it is thought that they extracted all of the easily-won metal. The mine was very productive for them but the many owners who ran the mine after the Victorian re-opening all went bust.
Photos: The coffin-shaped Roman tunnel; Our guide demonstrating the use of the Roman waterwheel used to drain the mines; The 1938 miners celebrating the production of their first 3 kg bar of gold.