Finding gold: An unexpected journey from river to ring

‘Gold has taken me to places I’d never have otherwise visited,’ Vincent Thurkettle says, as we stand on the deserted platform of Sanquar train station in Dumfries and Galloway. Like Bilbo Baggins, wrenched from his cosy home in The Shire, I have traded my loyal sofa for a remote Scottish river. The destination is the same — a cornucopia of riches. With Vincent as my Gandalf, I am going on an adventure. We are hunting for gold.

The journey begins with my housemate’s engagement. On returning from her holiday she held her left hand aloft and a ring sparkled tantalisingly. Beyond the congratulations, I wondered: where did that gold come from? Why do we prize it so highly? And what had it gone through before ending up on her finger? That is why I am in Scotland.

On our walk to Vincent’s car to begin our day’s panning, he notices a five pence piece on the floor. It is this Gollum-like pull to shiny objects that led Vincent, aged 49, to quit his full-time job. Ever since, he has been battling an incurable sickness: gold fever.

On our way to Wanlockhead, the (often debated) highest village in Scotland, Vincent tells me his story. He worked for the Forestry Commission for 28 years as the deputy director for the East of England, before chucking it all in to pursue gold panning full-time. He found the largest gold nugget (at the time) in Britain, worth an estimated £50,000, off the coast of Anglesey in 2012; it weighed 97 grams. It was pipped to being the largest by a 121.3 gram nugget found in 2019.

He also came fourth in this year's gold prospecting British championships, losing out to the current British champion Daisy, his daughter. Now, he has written a new book. Finding Gold: My life-changing treasure hunt with nature, in which he tries to explain civilisation’s magnetic draw to this honey-coloured metal.

Gold is 4 billion years old — older than the Earth itself. It was formed when massive stars exploded and when neutron stars collided. This became mixed with cosmic dust and rock when our solar system formed, which is how gold came to be spread deep within the Earth’s crust in small quantities. Landslides, volcanic activity, high pressure and erosion have brought it closer to the surface, and our tools for finding it have become much more advanced. It is usually found in quartz and river deposits (like the one we are searching today) where it has been washed by erosion.

In its pure form gold is very malleable and non-reactive. It is also very heavy — it has a specific gravity of 19.3, meaning that a piece of pure gold is 19.3 times heavier than the exact same volume of water, which makes it sink to the bottom of our rivers. It is this heaviness that allows for panning.

‘It is a treasure hunt,’ he says. ‘The river has hidden a few tiny specks of gold, and it's an incredible challenge to find them.’

He also runs gold prospecting courses for those wishing to acquire the Midas touch — telling them about how to gain licences to legally pan for gold, where to go to do so, how to use a gold pan, and so on. ‘On YouTube, half the people finding big gold nuggets are lying. They're painted stones. There are a lot of charlatans,’ Vincent explains. Everyone from divorcees to the dying attend his courses. Gold seems to give people hope. ‘It’s an enormous range,’ says Vincent. ‘Maybe 25% of people who come on the course are hurting.’ On a happier note, many are also looking to propose with a ring made, at least in part, of gold they’ve found themselves.

We arrive at the river and gather the various tools needed from Vincent’s car. Equipped with two gold pans, a pick axe (that I admit, does worry me at first, given that I am in a remote location with a man I have never met before), water pump, vials for our spoils, and Wellington boots, we trudge into the water. His favourite way to pan for gold is by lying face down in the river in a wetsuit with a knife, chipping away for nuggets. I decide sitting on a rock will be sufficient for today. After a bit of deliberating, Vincent chooses a spot — a reasonably shallow cranny where he thinks gold may be lurking.

He uses the pick axe to break away a few rocks, then, with the pump, extracts a pan’s worth of residue from the river bed. We will work this particular part of the river bed until it’s ‘clean’, Vincent says. I sit on a nearby rock and watch as he rakes the lighter material off the top of the surface with his fingers. Then begins the painstaking process of swirling the material around the pan and gently sifting off the lighter debris into the river. Eventually, small shiny things begin to reveal themselves amid the rubble. ‘There, there!’ I shout excitedly.

With the weariness of a man that has heard this many times before, Vincent informs me: ‘There’s a phrase in gold panning: If you think that it's gold, it isn't.’ He is, of course, right. I have spotted a shiny stone, not a gold nugget.

After a while, Vincent gets down to the real dregs of his pan. ‘Are you ready not to be impressed?’ he asks, pointing towards something that I can barely see, perhaps a quarter of the size of a grain of sugar. ‘To be a gold prospector in Britain you need to have good eyesight,’ he jokes.

Excitingly, we have found gold on our first attempt. Less excitingly, it is miniscule. ‘They’re not the size of baked beans — they’re the size of full stops,’ Vincent explains, of the nuggets to be found in the UK, before adding: ‘A full stop would be a generous one.’ Our tiny bounty, however, proves that the spot Vincent has chosen is worth plundering.

We return to the crevice and suck up a new load of rubble. It is my turn. Holding the gold pan on my knee, I carefully sift and sort for what feels like hours as the baking sun beats down. I am growing weary until one swirl reveals an unmistakable semi-circle of yellow shininess.

‘It’s gold. It is!’ I shout to Vincent, sure this time that I can’t have been mistaken. He starts to repeat the old adage until he spots my glowing haul. I have struck gold on my very first try and, compared to our previous haul, it is practically a mine. Around 20 small nuggets, all considerably larger than our first find, wink up at me. The feeling is exhilarating and all thoughts of my aching back, wet socks, and surely sunburnt neck are banished. Vincent beams, his smile almost as bright as the gold in my pan. ‘You’ve experienced the best of it,’ he says to me, safely ushering the precious cargo into a vial. ‘That’s yours to keep.’ I feel myself come over by something almost incurable. The excitement is almost unbearable. Gold fever is catching.

Panning with Vincent in a remote Scottish river isn’t the only way to find gold, otherwise people would have to propose with Haribo rings. Many do it on a more industrial scale. John Reade is a senior market strategist at the World Gold Council, a membership organisation that champions gold’s role as an asset. Their members are large scale gold mining companies that ‘produce’ gold around the world, of which there are 29 in total. Newmont and Barrick are the biggest and most famous.

‘These are very, very different from your Scottish gold panners,’ John confirms. ‘These are companies that that mine millions of tons of rock a year — hundreds of millions of tons — and produce, each of them, millions of ounces of gold.

‘They concentrate it to 70%-80% pure. It then goes to refineries that turn that concentrated gold into pure gold, and those refineries turn it into coins, bars and jewellery industry feedstock.’

How sustainable is this practice? According to data from the U.S. Geological Survey, each year about 3,000-3,700 tons of pure gold is mined. ‘There’s around 55,000 tons of gold in reserves — that’s gold that is known to mining companies,’ John says, but he is confident that we will continue mining gold ‘for the foreseeable future’. However, he warns, it is ‘getting harder to find gold and to get the environmental and social permits you need to start a gold mine’. Gold is mined on every continent except Antarctica, but less than 1% of global gold production comes from Europe.

It’s clear that John could talk about this all day. ‘You’re literally just scratching the surface,’ he says, ‘talking to someone who used to work 2,000 metres below the surface. That gold in the ring on your friend’s finger could contain gold that was mined by the Incas, it could have been on the fingers of pharaohs’ — it could also have been, theoretically, a gold tooth that was chewing jellied eels in the mouth of an East End gangster. Nevertheless, I am keen to move onto the next stage in my journey from river to ring. For this I need to talk to a gold trader.

‘Gold is a continually fluctuating commodity,’ says Jon White, who launched Gold-Traders (UK) Ltd in 2008. ‘It’s no different to oil or wheat or any other commodity that is traded on the open markets, so every minute of the day, just like stocks and shares, the price goes up or down.’ In 2026, the price of gold hit an all time high. ‘Primarily because of international conflict going on overseas… but gold is the primary commodity we come to in times of instability.’

The irony is that gold is technically ‘useless’. ‘Obviously it’s used in jewellery and recognised as a store of wealth, but from an industrial perspective it has very little reuse,’ Jon says. ‘But it is the safest way that you can tie up your assets in times of instability, because there will always be someone who wants to buy it from you.’

Unfortunately, the trading of precious metals is entirely unregulated, meaning it’s down to the consumer to determine whether they’re being offered a fair price for their gold, although Jon is campaigning to get the law changed to introduce more transparency in the market. Much ‘recycled’ gold also has a tragic history. Plenty was mined by slaves, and plenty of innocent blood was spilled to acquire it. Nevertheless, our demand for it endures.

Perhaps this is because we associate it with gods and kings. Perhaps it is because we associate it with tangible coins. Maybe it is because gold cannot truly be destroyed, as it is a noble metal it doesn’t tarnish, corrode or rust and cannot be broken down by a single acid. I imagine it also has something to do with it being rather beautiful. Either way, it seems a fitting metal with which to pledge a lifelong devotion.

‘Every single gram of gold that has ever existed since the Big Bang, when planet Earth was first created, still exists on our planet — apart from the gold that's now been sent up into space, that’s floating around in satellites or sitting on the surface of the moon,’ says Jon.

Cassandra Goad, who makes fine jewellery in London, is likewise smitten with the metal. ‘It’s the magical brilliance, for me, of nature producing this metal from the earth, and then this holding of stories and history within it that is so important.’ But the gold market has not been kind to jewellers this year. ‘Inevitably one is affected by the price of gold. Of course you are. I mean it was terrible at the beginning of the year because the price just went ridiculous,’ she says. Her fellow jewellers agree.

In January, I spoke to Cece Fein-Hughes of Cece Jewellery. ‘It’s really stressful,’ she said. ‘We are going to increase our prices soon. We have to. It makes me really upset, because it just suddenly cuts out a whole market of people for fine jewellery.’

In the same month, Sheherazade Goldsmith, the brains behind Loquet London, agreed. ‘Being a jeweller, because you're affected so much by the price of gold, you know what's going on. I sort of know when the price of gold is going to go up again just because of what's happening in the news,’ she said. ‘We opened the year with war in Venezuela, and the Chinese looking at Taiwan, and basically with the Americans deciding that they can just go and depose anyone they like.’

Cassandra, however, is still doing lots of business. Her customers either have gold jewellery they'd like turned into something new, or want a new piece entirely. ‘Most gold nowadays is, by definition, recycled,’ she says. ‘Gold, in its purest form, is almost as soft as silver, and therefore it's completely useless to have a ring made of 24-carat gold because it'll just bend all over the place.’ In order to change the mechanical properties of the ring, it is alloyed with different elements like copper, zinc and silver, to improve its hardiness. The highest and most expensive carat that is really used in jewellery making is 22. Eighteen-carat gold, for example, has 75% pure gold in the alloy.

Cassandra begins by melting down the gold in a small crucible, then pouring it into a steel skillet. This creates a rod of gold, which she’ll then ‘pickle’ in some acid, clean and hammer it and then run it through rolling mills. She will shape the ring and size it, soldering the joint on the band, before sending it off to be assayed.

This is the final step in our journey, before a ring gets into the sweaty anxious palm of someone set to propose. Will Evans, the director of the London Assay Office at The Goldsmiths' Company, is responsible for making sure gold is what its makers say it is. ‘We've been testing precious metals here at the Goldsmiths’ Company for almost 700 years,’ he says.

‘Gold is the one thing that you can't really judge by looking at it. Nine carat and 22 carat and brass all have vaguely similar visible properties, so somebody has to check, and in the UK, the person who checks is not the same person as the one who made it or is selling it to you.’ This process is called hallmarking.

First, the assay office tests the gold product, in this case our wedding ring, using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry — a non-destructive technique used to determine the elemental composition of materials. ‘Sometimes, especially if people are mixing various types of new gold and old gold, they get their calculations wrong,’ Will says. ‘Sometimes people may do it nefariously to try and pass things off as a higher standard. So that's what we're doing. We're making sure that when you buy a piece, you're getting what you pay for in terms of the precious metal.’ Once the hallmarking process is complete, and pieces stamped with the legal seal of approval — at Will’s company their emblem is a leopard’s head — the pieces are ready to be sold.

‘There is no diamond fever or sapphire fever or palladium or platinum fever, but there is a gold fever,’ Vincent said to me, as we left the river behind, and now I see why. It is a multi-faceted element. All at once totally useless and at the same time enduringly desirable. ‘People get obsessed about gold, and it seems like almost every civilisation on Earth has, throughout time,’ he said..After all, Bilbo wouldn’t have gone all the way to Erebor if the dwarvish treasure trove was made up of platinum. Likewise, I’m sure my friend would’ve said yes to a wooden ring, but the fact that she has a gold one makes it just that bit more special.