Recording the life at hand through photography
Scottish Gold Panning Championships 2024
Last year I wrote an article about Scotland’s highest village, Wanlockhead, in which I described its historical connection to mineral extraction, a connection which made it the ideal location to host this year’s Scottish and British Gold Panning Championships. With the event being run over a weekend, I chose to go with the most favourable weather forecast and visited on the Saturday for the home nation’s competition.
The village sits in a small valley with rows of miner’s cottages spread over the surrounding hillsides. The event was located in the car park of the Lead Mining Museum and consisted mainly of ten large tanks, presumably where the actual panning would take place. As the published start time loomed it seemed to be running way behind schedule, so I took a wander up the hillside and around some of the lanes looking for signs of life in and around the old miners cottages. This is a remarkably bleak place, it’s difficult to tell if some of the cottages are inhabited or have been abandoned, just like the scrap cars and other assorted junk that seem to appear around every corner. As expected, nothing stirred save for a few sheep wandering about. In fact, the only sounds were birds overhead mixed with the squeals of children playing on the hillside opposite the museum.
I made my way back down to the competition area and arrived just as the first heats were getting underway. Buckets preloaded with grit, hopefully containing gold ore, were stacked behind the timekeeper’s tent. Each competitor was given a pan, a filled bucket, and a small phial in which to store their fortune if found. Once underway the competitors, already in their allotted tank, started working their way through the grit, sloshing water around the pan in a motion that gradually removed grit into the tank. The panning action was strangely mesmerising, almost hypnotic. Occasionally a finger would reach in and pick up a tiny speck that was invisible to my eye and place it in the phial. The lucky ones did this more than once. After a set time the event was over, and the phials were handed to the judges for examination.
Although it was a low-key event there was something very special about it. This was family fun the old-fashioned way, kids running wild on the hillside, rolling around in the grass and sheep shit while the parents tried their luck in the water tanks using a technique largely unchanged for millennia. No one staring into a phone or gaming device, in fact the only technology in use was an ancient digital clock and my cameras, both analogue and digital. I always feel good about life when I attend these quiet rural events, thankfully there are a lot more to come over the next few months. I may even have a roll around in the grass myself!
