herald supplement

I could not download this or cut and paste it , so did it the old fashioned way, took me an hour , missed out one paragraph about some women's cottage ( of no relevance ). If the link becomes available will post later, currently you have to pay , 4 page spread with photo's . Excuse the typo's

It is worth reading , the future looks very good to say the least !

HEADING

GOLD?
YOU CAN FIND IT ON
EVERY DAMNED HILL
______________________

SUB HEADING
Chris Sangster has no truck with chance - its
a mining engineer's job to turn rocks into hard cash.
And he sees a seam of it stretching across Scotland.

The River Orchy is high, foaming and boiling through the rocks. It Sprays rainbowsacross the rusty bracken and dark green grass if the banks. On a bend in the river,
halfway down the glen, holes have been drilled into the land close to a spot where a flash of quart can sometimes be seen through the water.

Less than five miles away, near Tyndrum, lies the country's first commercial gold mine in 500 years, a shaft and spoil-heap already scarring Glen Cononish. A bitter battle was
fought against the original development by some conversationists but mining bosses hope many more mines will follow across Scotland, from Kintyreto the Great Glen. The next
one could be here in Glen Orchy and would be based on what mine company Scotgold Resources calls the River Vein. According to chief executive Chris Sangster, gold mining
could have a gleaming future in Scotland in a belt of rocks running through many of its most scenic areas. The recent unexpected discovery of promising quantities of platinum
in the area by Scotgold has also boosted the prospects of mine development.

Supporters believe hard-rock mining cold boost the economy of the country and provide vital employment where steady, non-seasonal work is needed. Those who opposerd the Cononish mine fear the attraction of jobs in an economic downturn could lead to permission for the mines without the needs of wildlife and conservation being taken into account. If a gold
rush happens, striking a balance in such scenic areas will be a considerable challenge.

At Cononish, booted and helmeted, Sangster leads off down the adit, a level shaft with a rusting iron railway running into the side of Beinn Chuirn for a kilometre above Cononish
Farm. The floor is up to six inches deep in water and there are occassional showers from above. It is a constant 5C.

The shaft runs along a vein of quartz.

REPORTAGE

The 53-year-old mining engineer explains this rock, produced when solid matter condensed from superheated steam from below the earth's crust, contains the gold and quantities of silver
too, There's almost 10g of gold to every tonne of rock in the vein, and 500,000 tonnes will be dug out to provide the five tonnes of gold the mine will produce.

Sangster points his torch at golden crystals in the mine roof. It's iron pyrites, or fool's gold. Despite the name, it is linked to the presence of gold, and often contains it.
"These dark areas are those with interesting material and probably gold in them," says Sangster. "The whiter the quartz, like the very white stuff on Benn Oss just across the valley, the
less gold there is. We are looking for the dirty stuff."

We halt about 800 metres in and inspect the rock. There's nothing to tell me this is anything special: the gold particles are invisible, less than one-twentieth of a millimetre across.
The shaft , dug by former mine owners Fynegold in the 1990s, will be widened in the next year, and eight to 10 men at a time will work here, in shifts, with about 26 underground
workers in total.

In addition, Sangster tells me as we trudge back out, there will be processing staff on the surface and an administrative team:53 jobs in all, many expected to go to locals who have driven lorries and operated heavy machinery in quarries and forestry.

Those jobs lay at the heart of plans to revive the mine which Fynegold abandoned before it went into production at the price of gold fell to $250 an ounce in 2001.
The mine was revived in 2007 by Scotgold as the price of gold went up; it's now around $1600 an ounce.

Sangster faced to the fresh obstacle that the mine now lay within Loch Lomand and the Trossachs National Park, created in 2002. Opposed by environmental and outdoor
group but heavily backed by the local community, the mine was given planning permission last October on Sangster's second application.

The mere act of getting it into operation will cost £20 million, raised from investors including Sangster himself, who has a 3% share in the Australian-based company. The mine will start producing gold towards the end of next year, with around a quarter of it produced by crushing the rocks on site and using gravity - a giant gold-panning system. The remaining rock will be
treated with chemicals in water to produce a concentrated ore to be sold for processing abroad.

The chemicals used will break down and the rock powder will settle out in a tailings dam outside the mine before clean water is released, eventually flowing into the River Cononish. It was
the size and shape of this settlement pond dug in the hillside, the most visible aspect of the development, which had to undergo major modifications before the second planning
application could be granted. Sepa, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, looked carefully at this aspect of the plan and was happy that the river water quality would not be
affected.

Sangster plans for the gold produced on site to be sold at a premium as Scottish, for wedding rings, but there's no romance in it for him, and he quietly crushes any ideas about
excitment, prospecting and coming up with nuggets. It's a business:if the numbers stack up, the resource can be extracted and sold. while he hopes the mine makes him a good
living, he doesn't expect it to make him rich.

"I am the director of a public company; my aim is to create value for my shareholders. If I couldn't do that I wouldn't be here, "he says. "I am a mining engineer - I break rocks for
money. Gold has no particular attraction for me. Gold attracts people's imagination and their imagination is so wild that it affects any rational view of what you are there for. It's
just a commodity."

Despite Sangster's pragmatism, the place itself has romance - it conjures up a cross between the Klondike and a fairy tale. It's a work camp in winter, rough buildings and a whipping
cold wind.

Outside the mineshaft when I first visit, the ground is blanketed white. Two Nissen hut-style buildings stand close by, electric light spraying out into the gloom. They are filled with
thousands of carefully recorded cores of rock, extracted with hollow drills fro the seam the mine lies on and other potentially gold-bearing sites in the area. The cores are beautiful, their polished surfaces showing the layers in the quartz and its speckles if minerals.

Jeff Smith the head geologist, is a Welshman with a grizzled beard. He peers over his glasses by lamplight, like a character from a Tokien story. A veteran of the South African gold
industry , he explains how the auriferous rock lies in a broad band from the southern edge of the Highlands to the Great Glen in the North, with Scotgold having licences to explore
from Kintyre to Pitlochry.

"There could be stuff all over this area, there is lots of gold in these hills" Smith says. "The Dalradian gold-bearing rocks run right over to Ireland, and extend north, but beyond Pitlochry they have been destroyed by the granite. "Also on site is Andy Riley, a local man who worked in a range of jobs before becoming a mine worker. He believes the planned 10 year ife of the mine is an underestimated. "There might be all
sorts in there, " he says." It could be a lot bigger than that. We don't know until we dig in,"

Back at the Scotgold offices in the former railway buildings at Tyndrum Upper Station, Sangster tells me gold was mined around Leadhills in South Lanarkshire in the 15th century, but then richer sources of gold were found in Canada, Australia, South America and Africa. Gold mines
became established in those places, along with mining skills and the processing industry. When richer resources ran out, poorer veins -
with less gold than Cononish - were exploited while the Scottish gold remained untapped.

"The old adage is that if you find gold the best place to look for more is next to it, so the discovery of these much larger deposits elsewhere meant the focus was lost in the UK. That doesn't mean it's not prospective for minerals."

Sangster never uses words like chance, possible, or - heaven forbid - lucky: it's prospective, and then assessed in numerical data. "If you look at the belt of the same rocks in Canada you have mines, if you look in the Appalachians you have mines."

With some trepidation, given his dislike of the dramatic, I ask, could we get a gold rush here? Sangster points to a map of gold finds in the area. "If I put that map in Tanzania and put Lake Victoria at the top of it because there's a big gold field at the bottom of Lake Victoria - and I
produced those results, you would probably have 10 companies banging on this door trying to get in, and the work would be conducted because it's a fashionable geological address. It's in a gold field," he says. "Three firms are exploring for gold in Northern Ireland because five or six years ago the Geological Survey of Northern Ireland spent £6M on a survey ; but now it's the right address, it's become more fashionable.

"I would be surprised if we didn't find something similar to Cononish or a number similar to Cononish in the area. There's enough evidence to say there is a lot of gold around here because you can find it on every damned hill."

The exploration is continuing, with a scattering of test sites, including one at Sron Garbh, three miles north-east of the Cononish mine, where miles north-east of the Cononish mine, where platinum was found. More drilling is expected there, Sangster calling it " a significant target".

Platinum is currently worth about per ounce as the same as gold, but it's price is much more volatile.

John Riley hopes there is a gold rush - or a platinum, for that matter. Now in his mid seventies, her chairs the Strathfillan community council and campaign for the mine.

A former undustrial metallurgist who latterly ran hotels, Riley say's the gold mine where his son Andy works is the best possible thing for
the area, bringing year round jobs. He also hopes tourism can benefit, with the community council mooting plans for a mulit-million pound
visting centre in Tyndrum. "It's an incredible place, the Cononish Glen, "he say's, "but you only have a tiny bit of it thats going to be ruined for then years and it's going to be put back better than it was before. Who's going to see it.

It could happen in dozen of places across the highlands but they are only minuet in comparison to the amount of scenery we have. And it's going to create great wealth for the whole country. Once they have established the principal of mining and once they have the shares and cash flow then they can open out in the whole area with gold and silver. It could drive the Scottish economy".

The Glen Orchy site, just outside the national park, is Scotgolds next best prospect that doesn't mean that it will go ahead, or even that Scotgold will apply to mine there but if Sangster and Riley are correct there will be many more applications for mines in the highlands.

For any application from Scotgold to extend Cononish or mine elswhere, there will be one obvious leaver on planners: 50-old jobs that could be lost if the company doesn't have somewhere to dig.

In Glen Orchy, test have shown ores richer than Cononish, and despite the vein running the river, Sangster is confident mining there could be practical.

(JMT) opposed the first application for a gold mine in Cononish. Policy officer Steve Turnbull say's the trust is only "border line happy" with the approved scheme, JMT is concerned about further mining "there is a heritage of mining at Cononish using existing sites and facilities," Turnbull
says. "Anything they go for now will have greater impact if the site doesn't have that heritage. It comes down to the location of the site, and we would see what lessons they have learn't from Cononish, and see if they take a greater level of environmental responsibility.

"if they develop one site at a time there is an element of sustainability. If there were two or three developments in close proximity that would be another matter.

The planning system is weaker outside the National Park. Outside the park it might be a difficulty case for us to argue against because they don't have to be as careful to balance the environmental and economic impact.

But Gordon Watson, director of planning for the National Park, hopes the compromise plan for the Cononish mine will benefit planners everywhere, and says the fact the first successful gold mine application was in the park will mean further mines are likely to be environmentally friendly.

The park turned down the first application on landscape grounds, and could do so because planning rules and the park said that the environment says the park comes first.

We have put down a marker on what is possible, Watson say's. Other authorities may not have the powers but hopefully we have a demonstration project that shows how its done in an environmentally sensitive way, and the next mine would have to follow that.

Planners from Argyll and Bute council, who have already met Sangster over prospects in their area, back this view.

The Cononish mine should start producing gold next year. Scotgold hopes the gold extracted by gravity - rather than by the more common method or using toxic chemicals - can be sold as environmentally friendly. Watson hopes that if nothing else such commercial factors will mean mines are keen to ensure there operations are clean and green. If miners want to sell the gold, he says then they should be motivated to make sure it is just that .