From the earliest time, man kind have been searching for multiple precious metals. Gold being one of them. Ancient Egyptians extracted gold for the production of jewellery and idols for worship. It wasn’t until 1500 BC, when gold started to be used for the exchange for international trade or as currency. Over the past 20 years, the value of gold has been significantly increasing from around £0.47 to £50 per gram.

Gold Panning is a traditional and popular activity where you set out searching in hope of gold in streams. This is a great activity for tourists and a family day out to get the children involved in outdoor activities. Gold Panning goes back to ancient times, where they used pans to extract gold and other sorts of metals from the streams.

How does Panning work?

The process of Gold Panning is very simple! All you need is a shallow pan and a Gold Panning location. Once you are ready to pan for gold, you simply put your pan under water and scoop out the mud, sand, and water from the stream. You then keep shaking the pan gently to bring the sand and mud to the top and the gold to the bottom as it is heavier. You can also get messy and use your hands to get rid of sand or pick out bigger pieces of gold. Slowly get rid of as much sand and mud as you can by tilting the pan to the side to let it back into the stream. Once you have a small amount of sand (and hopefully gold!) you start to swirl the pan which will allow you to separate the sand and gold. However, if you want a better panning technique, what you do instead of swirling is get to the point where you have a small amount of sand, get it all to one side, tilt your pan away from that corner and tap the corner with the sand. This technique will let all the gold gravitate towards the tapping and the sand away from the tapping. This then creates a gold smile on the edge where you will be able to scoop the gold out. There is no wrong technique to panning, as long as it gets you that gold you came for!

Panning sites:

Areas where you can go panning in the United Kingdom that still have gold are:

Scotland – Dumfries and Galloway.

England – The Lake District, the Pennines, the Forest of Dean, River Swale and Cornwall.

Wales – The Dolgellau Gold Belt and ancient Dolaucothi Gold Mines.

Ireland – The Gold Mines River.

All these locations still produce gold to this day. There are other locations that have not yet been found that produce gold or locations that are on private land. There are of course laws put into place when it comes to gold panning! You have to be careful with where you extract gold from. If it is not a gold panning site but private land, you have to get permission and the agreement of the landowner. The landowner is also entitled to any profits made as it is their land. Always make sure to be respectful of your surroundings and environment leaving it in the state you first arrived to, not leaving any rubbish behind, and make sure to have fun! Happy Gold Panning.

If you’re just looking for a fun family day out then you can go to Crealy adventure park in Exeter where you can pan for fools gold.