Should you be allowed to head into a Welsh river and pan for gold?
After a repeat offender was convicted of illegally gold panning at Coed y Brenin, George Browne, Richard Prideaux and Amy Green look at what seems like a fairly harmless countryside hobby and the much bigger questions sitting underneath it.
They discuss Welsh gold, who owns it, why disturbing river gravel can matter for spawning fish, and whether prosecuting one gold panner is really an effective use of environmental enforcement.
From there, the conversation broadens into access versus impact. What happens when a quiet activity becomes popular? Can education and self-policing work better than simply banning things? And does social media inevitably turn good countryside spots into honeypots?
That leads from mountain biking and bothies to commercial mushroom picking, foraging pressure and the strange reality of people fighting over valuable fungi in Welsh forests.
In this episode
- Geology, rock hounding and reading the landscape
- Welsh gold and the history of gold mining
- The Coed y Brenin gold-panning prosecution
- Who owns gold and silver found in Britain
- Gold panning and salmon spawning habitat
- Access versus environmental impact
- The tragedy of the commons
- Mountain biking, bothies and countryside honeypots
- Social media and the pressure on popular places
- Commercial mushroom picking and wild food
- Education, self-policing and responsible access
Links
- Natural Resources Wales: Repeat offender convicted for illegal gold panning
- The Crown Estate: Commercial exploration of Mines Royal
- Natural Resources Wales: Coed y Brenin
- Natural Resources Wales: Welsh salmon remain in crisis
- Mountain Bothies Association
- Support SideCountry
Credits
Presented by Richard Prideaux, George Browne, and Amy Green
Produced for SideCountry by George Browne and edited by Amy Green.
DISCLAIMER
Views are those of individual speakers and do not necessarily represent SideCountry, its presenters, contributors, partners or sponsors. For general information and entertainment only. Laws, seasons, access and guidance change; check official sources, obtain permission and act within your competence.
This transcript was generated using AI and may contain minor errors.
George Browne: Are either of you a bit weird like me and have a sort of unhealthy interest in geology?
Richard Prideaux: I have a love-hate relationship with it. I do like glacial morphology and I like seeing a landscape and sort of working out, oh yes that's where a glacier came through here and there are some drumlins and that's terminal moraine. But also I was turned off proper rock geology by the guy who taught me how to rock climb because he was a geologist and you'd be hanging on a fingernail on the pitch above him on a mountain route. He'd say, oh, if you just look to your left, there's the remains of some coral from when the British Isles were somewhere just south of the equator and it was in a tropical sea. And I'd say, I don't really give a crap, Alan. I'm going to die if I don't make this nice move.
George Browne: What about you, Amy?
Amy Green: My answer was just simply going to be it rocks. But to be honest, geology is never something that I have learned a lot about, but I do find it fascinating when people know about it and they're sharing their kind of enthusiasm about it. It's one of those topics for me.
George Browne: Yes, I think about it in the same way as I think about music, which is I'm terrible at it and I'm fascinated by people who know about it and by the subject itself. But it sort of starts getting too sciencey for me and I sort of glaze over a bit. But I'm really interested in, well, as you guys know, to your cost, I'm really interested in chalk, for example. You know, there's lots of chalk where I live and I'm just sort of interested in this idea that there's stuff under our feet that is interesting and that we never look at. But like you, Richard, I'm also interested in looking at a landscape and seeing the striations and that kind of thing. And I took the kids down to the Jurassic Coast at the end of the summer holidays and we went fossil hunting and the idea that there's sort of fascinating things just there waiting to be eroded out or dug out is kind of, it's got this sort of weird romance to it, I think.
Richard Prideaux: There's a glacial erratic in more of the woodlands we look after. So it's on top of a hill and a glacial erratic is a boulder that's been plucked from the side of a mountain by a glacier sort of encapsulated in the ice like a chunk of what's the crispy bit you get in a toffee crisp, like a rice crispy thing in the caramel. And then it's sort of that's moved across the landscape over decades as the glaciers moved at a glacially slow pace all the way down the valley. And then as the ice melted at the end of the glacier's life, it sort of dumped that rock on the side of the hill. So that's what an erratic is. And we've got this one that's from 30 miles away, 40 miles away, because you can tell by the rock type where the nearest sort of mountain of that rock type is. upstream basically on this glacier. But that thing's been there on top of a hill for 10,000 years, which is about the length of time this part of Wales has been inhabited sort of continuously. So that's probably been a landmark for people. You know, I'll meet you by the big rock on the hill.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's so I like that kind of thing that glacial and geological stuff becomes something that passes on beyond generations and sort of goes throughout history as there's that thing that's weird, we can go and look at it.
George Browne: Yes, I mean, glacial erratic is also how I've been described. But I'm also interested in the way that the geology affects, you know, culture and society in general. You know, I have this theory that the reason that people from the north are sort of viewed as being hard is because they're all on granite, whereas we southern softies have got, sort of Wensleydale-like chalk underneath, so we're a bit softer.
Richard Prideaux: I've got a poster on the wall which a friend sent to me because I've got a friend who's a field geologist. He goes around to places ending in the word Stan and sort of tells them where to drill, where to dig or wherever. And he's got the, you used to be able to get these huge geological posters that would be a cross section of Wales or a cross section of the county or something. And it would say from this line to this line, if you went down a mile, this is the rock you'd find at different places. And you've got all these different layers and you can see it's sort of been where it's been scraped out or added to. And you've got these random pockets of different rock in other places that you would think, why is there sandstone sat there on top of all this limestone? But why is there a new sandstone on that side of the river and limestone on this side of the river? But then you start looking at the soil and things, you can see it all in there and you think, oh yeah, we are just on this big patchwork of stuff.
George Browne: Yeah. Does he lick a lot of rocks? Geology is the only science that you can lick.
Richard Prideaux: Although apparently zoology is the one where the science licks back.
George Browne: Yes, exactly.
Amy Green: Yeah. I quite like the fact that you can go anywhere in the world and find rocks that are similar to those that you'd find at home as well. So for example, you've got Giant's Causeway in Ireland and a bit on the edge of Scotland as well, actually. And it's that that type of rock that forms the columns, but also you find that in Tasmania, which is the opposite side of the world.
George Browne: Yeah. So those are obviously not formed as part of the same geological tectonic thing that happened, but the same process has occurred.
Amy Green: Yeah, a little bit like co-evolution where you've got bats fly and birds also fly. So they both fly, different mechanisms for it, but they both fly. And there's other examples of that as well, where you've got animals that have adapted to completely different environments in the same sort of way to survive.
George Browne: And come up with the same solution, but independently. Yeah, Fascinating. Do you know the term for an amateur geologist?
Amy Green: No.
George Browne: It's called rock hounding. One is a rock hound. It's quite good, isn't it?
Amy Green: That is quite cool.
Richard Prideaux: When do you go from being a rock hound to a geologist then? What's the?
George Browne: Well, I think when you have a degree.
Richard Prideaux: Is that it?
George Browne: Probably or a salary.
Richard Prideaux: The Americans do a lot more of this. I know in the hunting and the backcountry hunting community there, they out of season go looking for weird anthropological and geological things. So they go looking for arrow points or they go looking for weird rocks out in the backcountry because effectively it occupies about 90% of the same brain space as going hunting.
George Browne: Yes, I suppose it does because you're thinking about how the, you know, where to look in the landscape for a particular thing. So, you know, when you're hunting whitetails or whatever, you're thinking, well, if I was a whitetail, where would I be? And if you're looking for arrowheads, you're thinking, well, if I was an indigenous American, where would I be? Where would I be hanging out? And therefore, where am I likely to find arrowheads? I'm desperate to find Flint arrowheads around us because, you know, when you've been here, there's Flint absolutely everywhere. I mean, it would be like looking for a needle in a proverbial haystack because there's so much Flint. But it strikes me that they must be here.
Richard Prideaux: And there's this thing of experimental archaeology that really upended the idea of how things were made and what Stone Age things were there in British landscape, because they started asking people who could work flint and could work stone to start, okay, try and replicate this object and what they were finding. And the British Museum did a lot of this in the 30s into the 50s. they found that a lot of their suppositions about, this thing is this old or this thing was made in this way. And it had this, it must have had this ritual significance that it's only worked on one side. And then they sat down with somebody doing flint knapping and went, oh, no, the one we found was a crap one that had been thrown away, that they'd only done one side and found a fault. So they just got rid of it. So it didn't have a ritual significance. It was just, it was something that was not finished. And it was just, it was just litter.
Amy Green: I love that. I have a friend who's an archaeologist and he likes to say that it's interesting when they're investigating and they're finding little bits of broken pottery and all this kind of thing and they're pulling all of these stories out and putting together basically a picture of what would happen and he said it could be completely wrong. They could have made this pot and not used it for eating out of but used it for something completely different like I don't know. putting scraps outside or just having there as a decoration or just not using it to contain anything. They just made this thing and then they chucked it out and it broke. And they never actually used that for that purpose or anything. It's like we don't actually know what these people did. But he just likes to look at it from a very different perspective and just be a bit of a who knows whether that was the real thing. It could be complete cobbles.
George Browne: I think that's part of the fascination, isn't it? If someone were to come into my kitchen, or if they were to excavate my kitchen in 1000 years time, they would reach all sorts of peculiar conclusions. I've got a very ornate Damascus steel buffalo horn handled kitchen knife that they would definitely say had some sort of ceremonial significance due to the fact that it's so beautiful. And I suppose in some ways it does because it's a completely useless knife from a functional cooking point of view. It goes blunt the moment you look at it. So I use it two or three times a year, but it doesn't have any particular significance. It's just a nice object. So yeah, it's interesting. Going back to Wales though, did you see this bloke got prosecuted for gold panning?
Richard Prideaux: It was all over our local news, the one that there was local news sites and you click on it and then you just hit with a tidal wave of ads before you actually get anywhere near the story.
George Browne: Yes, local news is delightful like that, isn't it? It's interesting. I didn't realise that, well, I suppose if I'd thought about it for a bit, I'd have reached the conclusion that one could successfully pan for gold in Wales because there was quite a big gold mining operation in Wales until comparatively recently, I suppose. And I think, is it Prince William or Prince William and Kate's wedding rings were made of Welsh gold, I think. But I'd never really thought of people going out panning for gold in the UK as a sort of hobby.
Richard Prideaux: I've seen it done in Scotland and I've seen it done in this corner of Wales where the guy was prosecuted. Although apparently the really good bit is north of there. But maybe he's already exhausted that spot. But yeah, there are weird mineral deposits all over Wales. There's a lot of lead and silver and apparently get lead and silver. They're in the similar areas. The gold, the Welsh gold thing, there's been a tradition for the last century or so. I think it started with Queen Elizabeth, who was, the Queen Mother, as we, our generation probably knows her. She was, I think she started with Welsh gold on her wedding ring. And then it became part of a tradition that they all, I think they all get it from Clog Eye Gold, is this place.
Amy Green: Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, Clog Eye St. David's was the mine around that Dalgatly sort of area.
Richard Prideaux: Right, okay.
Amy Green: And it's something that's been continued, but that mine actually closed down a few years back and then somebody else has checked it out recently, another company, and they found that there is more gold there, but I don't know whether it's actually accessible. I think that might be the thing.
George Browne: There is a big kind of UK gold panning community on YouTube. And there are videos of lots of people panning, lots of videos of people panning for gold in Wales. And so I think, well, how come this bloke's been prosecuted? Or are these people on YouTube publicising their crimes and just awaiting prosecution, waiting for somebody to come and knock on the door and say, stop it. It's a bit peculiar.
Richard Prideaux: So I've got this theory that with slightly underfunded or overstretched public bodies like Natural Resources Wales. They haven't actually got the time or the resources to prosecute everyone, chase everyone down. So what they do is they find one that they know they can get a solid prosecution on to make that prosecution and then hopefully it'll have a ripple effect and everyone else stops.
George Browne: Yes, that's an interesting theory. I mean, yes, I think that part of it is that this guy was on Natural Resources Wales managed ground and that they have a rule that you can't do it. And I think had this chap been on private ground with landowner's permission, he'd have been allowed to pan for gold. But any gold he found, I think, would still belong to the crown.
Amy Green: Yeah, I believe all gold and silver in the UK belongs to the crown effectively, regardless of whether you own the mineral rights of the land or not.
George Browne: So how does that work for this mine that's just maybe reopening then? I mean, presumably they're buying a license. Is that must be something of that nature?
Amy Green: Presumably.
Richard Prideaux: Harvesting mussels, same sort of thing.
Amy Green: Maybe, yeah. I mean, it's all quite new. They've taken, they took on the license only in like, I think it was 2020. And it was a closed mine that they've then taken on the the license for and they've said that they took it on for diamond drilling, not for gold. Wow.
George Browne: Welsh diamonds.
Amy Green: Yeah. And then they've discovered that there is still gold left there. But I haven't actually seen anything that says what they plan to do about it or how that works, to be honest. So but in the rivers they can't, it's not like there's massive chunks of gold that are floating down or settling and there's like a salmon laying its eggs right next to this chunk of gold, is it? must be tiny.
George Browne: I mean, this is one of the things that the news report said is that in part, this guy is in breach of the salmon protection laws because they potentially, what he's doing when panning, you're sort of digging up the gravel and the silt and what have you and trying to, when you're panning, the gold obviously being heaviest sits at the bottom. So you're just basically washing the gravel away until you until you end up with your, I mean, tiny flakes, specks of gold in the bottom of the pan. And so obviously if you are digging up gravel, that is what salmon and trout and sea trout and plenty of other fish like to lay their eggs in. So you are damaging that spawning habitat. But it strikes me that one bloke can't do that much damage and It's, when you consider that, for I think it's 40% of the rivers in Wales are considered to be, in poor condition when it comes to comes to salmon populations and we've got water quality issues absolutely everywhere in the UK. It strikes me that this is potentially a bit of a misuse or a peculiar choice of spend on behalf of Natural Resources Wales.
Amy Green: It does seem like they've used him to make an example of, as it were, because this isn't the first time he has been caught. And he's not even a, he's not actually, I'm going to sound really horrible now, but he's not actually local either. He's from Oxfordshire.
George Browne: You say you're actually from Stockport, Manchester. Exactly.
Amy Green: I mean, I can't speak, but. He's from Oxfordshire and he travels to, he's travelled to Dogbethli to pan for gold in this location and he's done it more than once. He's been caught and fined before. Oh, has he? Yeah, and what he actually said was that he was demonstrating how to pan for gold for an enforcement officer and they filmed him and set him up.
Richard Prideaux: What?
Amy Green: Which is quite interesting.
Richard Prideaux: If you were going to break the law here, how would you do it? Oh, I'd do it like this.
Amy Green: Gotcha. So I don't know. But it is the impact on the river ecosystem, I think, is a fairly valid point because salmon are under enough pressure as it is without having, I suppose, the encouragement. Maybe that's more the thing that NRW are trying to do. do is put more people off coming and panning for gold because it's quite easy to get to the location that he was in, which was in Croy de Brennan. And it's not difficult to get down there. It's not difficult to access the river. You could quite easily go and pan for gold. Maybe they're worried that if people discover there's gold there, it's going to encourage an influx of more and influences. Well, yeah, kind of mini modern day gold rush, which then TikTok rush. Make it even worse for salmon there perhaps because that particular catchment is a salmon run.
Richard Prideaux: It's a weird corner because it's a bit like the west coast of Scotland. You've got rivers there, but they have relatively short catchments, as in the sea to source there is not that long because it's going up to this little bowl of hills. And I think it's the Avon Wen was the river. So Avon in Welsh River. So you've got Avon Wen, and that runs down into the Avon Mauthach, which is then the Mauthach history, which comes out at Barmouth and Fairborn. So that's, it's probably less than 20 miles from source to sea there. So there's not, and there's not much in the way of dairy stuff in there. So there's no big commercial dairy with a slurry runoff or those kind of things. There aren't many big towns. I think Dogathalay is the biggest town there. And if you've been to Dogathalay, you know that it's hardly a bustling metropolis. So in terms of overall pollution, it sort of doesn't fare any worse than any other place. So.
George Browne: So those rivers are in pretty good nick then you're saying basically?
Richard Prideaux: They're no better or worse than anywhere else on the west coast of the British Isles, I would say.
George Browne: And there are a lot worse.
Richard Prideaux: So I'm sticking with my theory of this was a prosecution to send a message to others.
George Browne: Yes. Interesting. I mean, I think it raises some interesting questions though, because, you know, I'm sort of broadly in favour of people getting out there and engaging in their hobbies. And, I just wonder if there's something that could be done to make it possible for people to do this. And, sporting only happens at, a particular time of year. I just wonder if there's a way to make it a bit easier for people to do this kind of thing. Because, I think, just thinking about gold in particular, there's obviously a lot of local history tied up in the activity, right? You need to understand, you don't just pick a river at random, do you? For example. And it's sort of meaningful activity in the countryside, I think I'm broadly in favour of.
Richard Prideaux: Is this the tragedy of the commons? That sort of the thing itself isn't the problem. The problem is when you do it at a population level, then it becomes an overused resource. Maybe there's a parallel in foraging?
George Browne: Well, I was thinking about this. It's about access and versus impact, isn't it, really? Which is quite a common topic in, you know, that we talk about quite a lot, really.
Richard Prideaux: It is, and it's sort of the O.K., so Coy de Brennan, which is a big forest around where this where this guy was gold panning, is it's a big mountain bike. destination. So there's been mountain bike tracks there for a couple of decades now. There's also a bothy right on one edge. So Penrose Issa, I think is the bothy there. So bothy being unmanned mountain hut that you can go and stay in. And bothies range from basically a corrugated iron shed all the way through to a house with two stories and two wood burning stoves and bunk beds and things. Most of them maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association, who you can donate to or volunteer for. But there's that, you can stay there. It's also one of the best Bletus Agelus, so Pacini, SEP, hunting grounds in Wales. All of which means it's pretty busy in that woodland. There's a lot of people all coming from all over Wales, all over the Midlands and north of England, travelling a long, way to all come to this place that they've heard of. which is not that inaccessible. You can get there, say, from Birmingham in about 3 hours. And they're all coming there for this wilderness experience. But by the fact that everyone comes there for that thing, to ride a bike through the middle of nowhere or to go foraging or to go and stay in this bothy, means you can't get that experience because everyone else has come there to do the same thing at the same time.
George Browne: Yeah. the honeypot effect.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So do we need more venues or to make the thing less cool?
George Browne: I think the problem with making the thing less cool is that it isn't going to happen. And it would sort of go against my sort of personal view that broadly people should be encouraged to do things, obviously, to do them in a responsible fashion. And I wonder if, similar to what we were talking about in the previous episode, it's more a question of education than it is of of stopping people from doing it all together.
Amy Green: That could well be it. I mean, there are websites. I found one called UK Gold Prospector, which has information about different areas where you can find gold in the UK and the laws and permits and how to pan and all these kind of things. So resources like that could just be quite useful. They've even got, yeah, they've got loads of information on there and I'm guessing there must be some other online forums where people talk about it and how to go about it and there's always going to be like a seedy underbelly to any of these things isn't there? There's always going to be the people that don't care about doing it ethically, morally, making sure that they're not causing harm to other parts of the landscape which they're in, all these kind of things, the same as there is for everything.
George Browne: Yeah, and it becomes a question of self-policing as well, you know, within the community and, you know, if there isn't the social pressure to do it properly, if the gold panning community is quite disparate, it's going to be difficult for that kind of, those social norms of behaviour to develop. And I guess the same is probably also true of mountain biking, unless you're, engaged with the wider mountain biking community or whatever it happens to be, you're not going to necessarily know, what the conventions are.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, maybe because social media is now affect, social media and AI search, I suppose I should add in there, are the places people learn about these things or get inspired to go and do that thing. Then people only really share the high points on social media. They only show the good times or they want to be perceived to be the expert slash best slash most popular slash most knowledgeable, most adventurous, whatever person in that world. So they show themselves going out to have great times all the time. So that's all that people see about that activity. They don't see any of the impact of it because no one shows it or they don't say I'm not doing this thing or having voluntary restraint because that's not popular. That won't help sell it. That won't help improve their social media profile. Although that said, there are a few people now who sort of adopt the opposite stance to what everyone else is saying on social media. They're being the influencer that says, nope, everyone else is lying to you. This is the truth.
George Browne: Yes, to be the source of truth.
Richard Prideaux: I've got a message here to read out that came in from a friend, which is sort of related to this. So, we live on the edge of a similar forest to Coeda Brennan called Claquinog, and it's a very another big, very big mushroom foraging spot. And you get commercial people harvesting illegally on Natural Resources Wales land. So, is this is the relevance harvesting illegally for commercial purposes mushrooms, so they pick them to sell. sell to restaurants, they drive them, they sell them into Europe. And there are, there are actually organized crime related to this, to mushroom foraging.
George Browne: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: But also there's a lot of voluntary independent stuff on it. So this is the message, anonymized. So true story. So while we were in the woods today at the redacted meetup, 2 unknown boys managed to turn over their car while driving down the redacted rd high above us. The car landed on the roof and they couldn't get out of the crushed doors, so they climbed through the windscreen and then ran away. The boot of the car and rode around were covered in mushrooms, specifically bright red Amanita muscaria. I am guessing there were mixed medicinal mushrooms foraging and drove home high as a kite on liberty caps, so turned the car over with rubbish driving reaction times and then decided to run away so they couldn't get tested for drugs.
George Browne: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: I know as well there have been like rival gang fights in Klecanog Forest over mushroom foraging and turf wars and things.
George Browne: When you say mushroom foraging, you mean illegal mushrooms rather than...
Richard Prideaux: No, sepsum.
George Browne: Really.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, because people, they are mushroom species, these mushroom species with high culinary value that cannot be cultivated. So you have to find them in the wild, which means you have to go to where they are growing at the right point to get the perfect example. You don't want to get them when they're too small, because when they get bigger, they will get bigger. There'll be more meat there effectively, more mushroom flesh. But if you wait too long, they go mouldy or the insects get to them. So you want to get them exactly the right point, but before someone else gets there. So it's all about timing and access and things like that. When we run mushroom ID courses there, we do not go anywhere near public access. We say to people, right, you are going to be walking a few miles because anywhere you can park, the area around it has been stripped clean.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And a lot of this is people picking it to sell, but to pick things to sell without the landowner's permission is theft.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So it is illegal by definition. But it's sort of illegal in the same way this guy panning for gold was illegal. It's sort of, if you could be willing to go through all the things required to prosecute, you could do it, but it would be more expensive to prosecute than let it happen.
George Browne: Well, I think this is probably my biggest problem with it is that the cost of prosecuting this bloke, I feel probably outweighs the benefit to the natural resource in the long run. I just can't believe that there are enough people panning for gold or enough people who are prepared to pan for gold that it's going to have a significant negative impact on the environment there. And I would probably have rather that they'd spent the money on, for example, getting on the water companies or tracking down some sewage pollution or some runoff from a farm or something like that, it strikes me that would probably have a greater impact in the long term and probably the short term. Just seems like a strange use of public money. And it can't have been cheap to prosecute this guy.
Richard Prideaux: No. I wonder in terms of press, it's had quite it's had more press reach than a public information film of don't do it.
George Browne: That's true.
Richard Prideaux: You know, this is gone, this has gone out internationally. So that it gets more attention with this. If something sounds a bit mad, then it's more likely to hear a broader audience.
Amy Green: I mean, anything about gold is going to spike interest. I wonder though, whether that may have backfired slightly on them in that they perhaps wanted people to see the fact that they were prosecuting based on the impact on fisheries, where most people are just saying it's all to do with the fact that it's gold and that you wanted the gold.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: Judging from like some of the comments on Facebook that I've seen regarding it, it's either you could do this, but you can't stop sewage going into rivers or it's you just bothered because he's taking your gold. You know, those seem to be the ones. So It's not, it's probably not the message that they wanted to send. They probably wanted to have a big win related to a wildlife crime prosecution, which is what it is at the end of the day. But yeah. so it's an interesting one.
Richard Prideaux: So once again, we have resolved absolutely nothing. We have asked a lot of questions.
George Browne: I don't know if we're here to resolve things. I think we're here. We're just asking questions like all of those ghastly influencer chaps in the manuscript, just asking questions. I don't know. I think there is a, there is a, it's sort of a wider theme that we always come to, which is how do you balance these things against each other? And I do think, you know, it's clear, you know, that this guy in particular didn't give a damn. You know, he's done it before. Several times, he's ignored the rules. And I guess when people are like that, you do have to slap the wrist and say, don't do it again.
Richard Prideaux: So when was the last time you fined? 2022, 23, something like that.
Amy Green: He was sentenced in 2022, yeah. And he was also caught in 2024, but it doesn't say that they were prosecuted by the side.
Richard Prideaux: At some point, is he actually, is this a cost of doing business? Is he making enough money from the gold?
Amy Green: I mean, maybe.
George Browne: It can't be.
Amy Green: Also, what do you do when you find gold? Because if it belongs to Crown Estate, does that mean that if you find any tiny flakes of gold, you can't keep them?
George Browne: I think it might come down to selling. So I think, for example, if you found a load of, if you found enough gold and you wanted to make yourself a ring from it, you could probably do that and get away with it. But I think if you wanted to sell it, I think that's where the issue would come in. And I don't know, do people, are there sort of, rogue jewellers out there buying moody gold off people? I don't know. Who knows?
Richard Prideaux: Maybe if you melt it down, mix it in with some other stuff as well. Go to cash converters and buy some cheap gold jewellery. And just sort of adulterate it with something else so then you can get it across. I probably shouldn't give people ideas. Anyone who's already thought of this has already knows more about this than I do and I'm an idiot.
George Browne: Yes, well, before we do encourage people to commit crimes, should we call it a day?
Richard Prideaux: I think it's a good benchmark, isn't it, for the show? Don't break the law. There you go. So there we are. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you for being here once again. And there's more on the Sidecountry website if you go to sidecountry.co.uk and you can find out more about the show, more about what we're trying to achieve here, more about who we are and lots of other fantastic resources. Bye.
George Browne: Bye. Bye.
George Browne: Are either of you a bit weird like me and have a sort of unhealthy interest in geology?
Richard Prideaux: I have a love-hate relationship with it. I do like glacial morphology and I like seeing a landscape and sort of working out, oh yes that's where a glacier came through here and there are some drumlins and that's terminal moraine. But also I was turned off proper rock geology by the guy who taught me how to rock climb because he was a geologist and you'd be hanging on a fingernail on the pitch above him on a mountain route. He'd say, oh, if you just look to your left, there's the remains of some coral from when the British Isles were somewhere just south of the equator and it was in a tropical sea. And I'd say, I don't really give a crap, Alan. I'm going to die if I don't make this nice move.
George Browne: What about you, Amy?
Amy Green: My answer was just simply going to be it rocks. But to be honest, geology is never something that I have learned a lot about, but I do find it fascinating when people know about it and they're sharing their kind of enthusiasm about it. It's one of those topics for me.
George Browne: Yes, I think about it in the same way as I think about music, which is I'm terrible at it and I'm fascinated by people who know about it and by the subject itself. But it sort of starts getting too sciencey for me and I sort of glaze over a bit. But I'm really interested in, well, as you guys know, to your cost, I'm really interested in chalk, for example. You know, there's lots of chalk where I live and I'm just sort of interested in this idea that there's stuff under our feet that is interesting and that we never look at. But like you, Richard, I'm also interested in looking at a landscape and seeing the striations and that kind of thing. And I took the kids down to the Jurassic Coast at the end of the summer holidays and we went fossil hunting and the idea that there's sort of fascinating things just there waiting to be eroded out or dug out is kind of, it's got this sort of weird romance to it, I think.
Richard Prideaux: There's a glacial erratic in more of the woodlands we look after. So it's on top of a hill and a glacial erratic is a boulder that's been plucked from the side of a mountain by a glacier sort of encapsulated in the ice like a chunk of what's the crispy bit you get in a toffee crisp, like a rice crispy thing in the caramel. And then it's sort of that's moved across the landscape over decades as the glaciers moved at a glacially slow pace all the way down the valley. And then as the ice melted at the end of the glacier's life, it sort of dumped that rock on the side of the hill. So that's what an erratic is. And we've got this one that's from 30 miles away, 40 miles away, because you can tell by the rock type where the nearest sort of mountain of that rock type is. upstream basically on this glacier. But that thing's been there on top of a hill for 10,000 years, which is about the length of time this part of Wales has been inhabited sort of continuously. So that's probably been a landmark for people. You know, I'll meet you by the big rock on the hill.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: It's so I like that kind of thing that glacial and geological stuff becomes something that passes on beyond generations and sort of goes throughout history as there's that thing that's weird, we can go and look at it.
George Browne: Yes, I mean, glacial erratic is also how I've been described. But I'm also interested in the way that the geology affects, you know, culture and society in general. You know, I have this theory that the reason that people from the north are sort of viewed as being hard is because they're all on granite, whereas we southern softies have got, sort of Wensleydale-like chalk underneath, so we're a bit softer.
Richard Prideaux: I've got a poster on the wall which a friend sent to me because I've got a friend who's a field geologist. He goes around to places ending in the word Stan and sort of tells them where to drill, where to dig or wherever. And he's got the, you used to be able to get these huge geological posters that would be a cross section of Wales or a cross section of the county or something. And it would say from this line to this line, if you went down a mile, this is the rock you'd find at different places. And you've got all these different layers and you can see it's sort of been where it's been scraped out or added to. And you've got these random pockets of different rock in other places that you would think, why is there sandstone sat there on top of all this limestone? But why is there a new sandstone on that side of the river and limestone on this side of the river? But then you start looking at the soil and things, you can see it all in there and you think, oh yeah, we are just on this big patchwork of stuff.
George Browne: Yeah. Does he lick a lot of rocks? Geology is the only science that you can lick.
Richard Prideaux: Although apparently zoology is the one where the science licks back.
George Browne: Yes, exactly.
Amy Green: Yeah. I quite like the fact that you can go anywhere in the world and find rocks that are similar to those that you'd find at home as well. So for example, you've got Giant's Causeway in Ireland and a bit on the edge of Scotland as well, actually. And it's that that type of rock that forms the columns, but also you find that in Tasmania, which is the opposite side of the world.
George Browne: Yeah. So those are obviously not formed as part of the same geological tectonic thing that happened, but the same process has occurred.
Amy Green: Yeah, a little bit like co-evolution where you've got bats fly and birds also fly. So they both fly, different mechanisms for it, but they both fly. And there's other examples of that as well, where you've got animals that have adapted to completely different environments in the same sort of way to survive.
George Browne: And come up with the same solution, but independently. Yeah, Fascinating. Do you know the term for an amateur geologist?
Amy Green: No.
George Browne: It's called rock hounding. One is a rock hound. It's quite good, isn't it?
Amy Green: That is quite cool.
Richard Prideaux: When do you go from being a rock hound to a geologist then? What's the?
George Browne: Well, I think when you have a degree.
Richard Prideaux: Is that it?
George Browne: Probably or a salary.
Richard Prideaux: The Americans do a lot more of this. I know in the hunting and the backcountry hunting community there, they out of season go looking for weird anthropological and geological things. So they go looking for arrow points or they go looking for weird rocks out in the backcountry because effectively it occupies about 90% of the same brain space as going hunting.
George Browne: Yes, I suppose it does because you're thinking about how the, you know, where to look in the landscape for a particular thing. So, you know, when you're hunting whitetails or whatever, you're thinking, well, if I was a whitetail, where would I be? And if you're looking for arrowheads, you're thinking, well, if I was an indigenous American, where would I be? Where would I be hanging out? And therefore, where am I likely to find arrowheads? I'm desperate to find Flint arrowheads around us because, you know, when you've been here, there's Flint absolutely everywhere. I mean, it would be like looking for a needle in a proverbial haystack because there's so much Flint. But it strikes me that they must be here.
Richard Prideaux: And there's this thing of experimental archaeology that really upended the idea of how things were made and what Stone Age things were there in British landscape, because they started asking people who could work flint and could work stone to start, okay, try and replicate this object and what they were finding. And the British Museum did a lot of this in the 30s into the 50s. they found that a lot of their suppositions about, this thing is this old or this thing was made in this way. And it had this, it must have had this ritual significance that it's only worked on one side. And then they sat down with somebody doing flint knapping and went, oh, no, the one we found was a crap one that had been thrown away, that they'd only done one side and found a fault. So they just got rid of it. So it didn't have a ritual significance. It was just, it was something that was not finished. And it was just, it was just litter.
Amy Green: I love that. I have a friend who's an archaeologist and he likes to say that it's interesting when they're investigating and they're finding little bits of broken pottery and all this kind of thing and they're pulling all of these stories out and putting together basically a picture of what would happen and he said it could be completely wrong. They could have made this pot and not used it for eating out of but used it for something completely different like I don't know. putting scraps outside or just having there as a decoration or just not using it to contain anything. They just made this thing and then they chucked it out and it broke. And they never actually used that for that purpose or anything. It's like we don't actually know what these people did. But he just likes to look at it from a very different perspective and just be a bit of a who knows whether that was the real thing. It could be complete cobbles.
George Browne: I think that's part of the fascination, isn't it? If someone were to come into my kitchen, or if they were to excavate my kitchen in 1000 years time, they would reach all sorts of peculiar conclusions. I've got a very ornate Damascus steel buffalo horn handled kitchen knife that they would definitely say had some sort of ceremonial significance due to the fact that it's so beautiful. And I suppose in some ways it does because it's a completely useless knife from a functional cooking point of view. It goes blunt the moment you look at it. So I use it two or three times a year, but it doesn't have any particular significance. It's just a nice object. So yeah, it's interesting. Going back to Wales though, did you see this bloke got prosecuted for gold panning?
Richard Prideaux: It was all over our local news, the one that there was local news sites and you click on it and then you just hit with a tidal wave of ads before you actually get anywhere near the story.
George Browne: Yes, local news is delightful like that, isn't it? It's interesting. I didn't realise that, well, I suppose if I'd thought about it for a bit, I'd have reached the conclusion that one could successfully pan for gold in Wales because there was quite a big gold mining operation in Wales until comparatively recently, I suppose. And I think, is it Prince William or Prince William and Kate's wedding rings were made of Welsh gold, I think. But I'd never really thought of people going out panning for gold in the UK as a sort of hobby.
Richard Prideaux: I've seen it done in Scotland and I've seen it done in this corner of Wales where the guy was prosecuted. Although apparently the really good bit is north of there. But maybe he's already exhausted that spot. But yeah, there are weird mineral deposits all over Wales. There's a lot of lead and silver and apparently get lead and silver. They're in the similar areas. The gold, the Welsh gold thing, there's been a tradition for the last century or so. I think it started with Queen Elizabeth, who was, the Queen Mother, as we, our generation probably knows her. She was, I think she started with Welsh gold on her wedding ring. And then it became part of a tradition that they all, I think they all get it from Clog Eye Gold, is this place.
Amy Green: Yeah, I think it was. Yeah, Clog Eye St. David's was the mine around that Dalgatly sort of area.
Richard Prideaux: Right, okay.
Amy Green: And it's something that's been continued, but that mine actually closed down a few years back and then somebody else has checked it out recently, another company, and they found that there is more gold there, but I don't know whether it's actually accessible. I think that might be the thing.
George Browne: There is a big kind of UK gold panning community on YouTube. And there are videos of lots of people panning, lots of videos of people panning for gold in Wales. And so I think, well, how come this bloke's been prosecuted? Or are these people on YouTube publicising their crimes and just awaiting prosecution, waiting for somebody to come and knock on the door and say, stop it. It's a bit peculiar.
Richard Prideaux: So I've got this theory that with slightly underfunded or overstretched public bodies like Natural Resources Wales. They haven't actually got the time or the resources to prosecute everyone, chase everyone down. So what they do is they find one that they know they can get a solid prosecution on to make that prosecution and then hopefully it'll have a ripple effect and everyone else stops.
George Browne: Yes, that's an interesting theory. I mean, yes, I think that part of it is that this guy was on Natural Resources Wales managed ground and that they have a rule that you can't do it. And I think had this chap been on private ground with landowner's permission, he'd have been allowed to pan for gold. But any gold he found, I think, would still belong to the crown.
Amy Green: Yeah, I believe all gold and silver in the UK belongs to the crown effectively, regardless of whether you own the mineral rights of the land or not.
George Browne: So how does that work for this mine that's just maybe reopening then? I mean, presumably they're buying a license. Is that must be something of that nature?
Amy Green: Presumably.
Richard Prideaux: Harvesting mussels, same sort of thing.
Amy Green: Maybe, yeah. I mean, it's all quite new. They've taken, they took on the license only in like, I think it was 2020. And it was a closed mine that they've then taken on the the license for and they've said that they took it on for diamond drilling, not for gold. Wow.
George Browne: Welsh diamonds.
Amy Green: Yeah. And then they've discovered that there is still gold left there. But I haven't actually seen anything that says what they plan to do about it or how that works, to be honest. So but in the rivers they can't, it's not like there's massive chunks of gold that are floating down or settling and there's like a salmon laying its eggs right next to this chunk of gold, is it? must be tiny.
George Browne: I mean, this is one of the things that the news report said is that in part, this guy is in breach of the salmon protection laws because they potentially, what he's doing when panning, you're sort of digging up the gravel and the silt and what have you and trying to, when you're panning, the gold obviously being heaviest sits at the bottom. So you're just basically washing the gravel away until you until you end up with your, I mean, tiny flakes, specks of gold in the bottom of the pan. And so obviously if you are digging up gravel, that is what salmon and trout and sea trout and plenty of other fish like to lay their eggs in. So you are damaging that spawning habitat. But it strikes me that one bloke can't do that much damage and It's, when you consider that, for I think it's 40% of the rivers in Wales are considered to be, in poor condition when it comes to comes to salmon populations and we've got water quality issues absolutely everywhere in the UK. It strikes me that this is potentially a bit of a misuse or a peculiar choice of spend on behalf of Natural Resources Wales.
Amy Green: It does seem like they've used him to make an example of, as it were, because this isn't the first time he has been caught. And he's not even a, he's not actually, I'm going to sound really horrible now, but he's not actually local either. He's from Oxfordshire.
George Browne: You say you're actually from Stockport, Manchester. Exactly.
Amy Green: I mean, I can't speak, but. He's from Oxfordshire and he travels to, he's travelled to Dogbethli to pan for gold in this location and he's done it more than once. He's been caught and fined before. Oh, has he? Yeah, and what he actually said was that he was demonstrating how to pan for gold for an enforcement officer and they filmed him and set him up.
Richard Prideaux: What?
Amy Green: Which is quite interesting.
Richard Prideaux: If you were going to break the law here, how would you do it? Oh, I'd do it like this.
Amy Green: Gotcha. So I don't know. But it is the impact on the river ecosystem, I think, is a fairly valid point because salmon are under enough pressure as it is without having, I suppose, the encouragement. Maybe that's more the thing that NRW are trying to do. do is put more people off coming and panning for gold because it's quite easy to get to the location that he was in, which was in Croy de Brennan. And it's not difficult to get down there. It's not difficult to access the river. You could quite easily go and pan for gold. Maybe they're worried that if people discover there's gold there, it's going to encourage an influx of more and influences. Well, yeah, kind of mini modern day gold rush, which then TikTok rush. Make it even worse for salmon there perhaps because that particular catchment is a salmon run.
Richard Prideaux: It's a weird corner because it's a bit like the west coast of Scotland. You've got rivers there, but they have relatively short catchments, as in the sea to source there is not that long because it's going up to this little bowl of hills. And I think it's the Avon Wen was the river. So Avon in Welsh River. So you've got Avon Wen, and that runs down into the Avon Mauthach, which is then the Mauthach history, which comes out at Barmouth and Fairborn. So that's, it's probably less than 20 miles from source to sea there. So there's not, and there's not much in the way of dairy stuff in there. So there's no big commercial dairy with a slurry runoff or those kind of things. There aren't many big towns. I think Dogathalay is the biggest town there. And if you've been to Dogathalay, you know that it's hardly a bustling metropolis. So in terms of overall pollution, it sort of doesn't fare any worse than any other place. So.
George Browne: So those rivers are in pretty good nick then you're saying basically?
Richard Prideaux: They're no better or worse than anywhere else on the west coast of the British Isles, I would say.
George Browne: And there are a lot worse.
Richard Prideaux: So I'm sticking with my theory of this was a prosecution to send a message to others.
George Browne: Yes. Interesting. I mean, I think it raises some interesting questions though, because, you know, I'm sort of broadly in favour of people getting out there and engaging in their hobbies. And, I just wonder if there's something that could be done to make it possible for people to do this. And, sporting only happens at, a particular time of year. I just wonder if there's a way to make it a bit easier for people to do this kind of thing. Because, I think, just thinking about gold in particular, there's obviously a lot of local history tied up in the activity, right? You need to understand, you don't just pick a river at random, do you? For example. And it's sort of meaningful activity in the countryside, I think I'm broadly in favour of.
Richard Prideaux: Is this the tragedy of the commons? That sort of the thing itself isn't the problem. The problem is when you do it at a population level, then it becomes an overused resource. Maybe there's a parallel in foraging?
George Browne: Well, I was thinking about this. It's about access and versus impact, isn't it, really? Which is quite a common topic in, you know, that we talk about quite a lot, really.
Richard Prideaux: It is, and it's sort of the O.K., so Coy de Brennan, which is a big forest around where this where this guy was gold panning, is it's a big mountain bike. destination. So there's been mountain bike tracks there for a couple of decades now. There's also a bothy right on one edge. So Penrose Issa, I think is the bothy there. So bothy being unmanned mountain hut that you can go and stay in. And bothies range from basically a corrugated iron shed all the way through to a house with two stories and two wood burning stoves and bunk beds and things. Most of them maintained by the Mountain Bothies Association, who you can donate to or volunteer for. But there's that, you can stay there. It's also one of the best Bletus Agelus, so Pacini, SEP, hunting grounds in Wales. All of which means it's pretty busy in that woodland. There's a lot of people all coming from all over Wales, all over the Midlands and north of England, travelling a long, way to all come to this place that they've heard of. which is not that inaccessible. You can get there, say, from Birmingham in about 3 hours. And they're all coming there for this wilderness experience. But by the fact that everyone comes there for that thing, to ride a bike through the middle of nowhere or to go foraging or to go and stay in this bothy, means you can't get that experience because everyone else has come there to do the same thing at the same time.
George Browne: Yeah. the honeypot effect.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah. So do we need more venues or to make the thing less cool?
George Browne: I think the problem with making the thing less cool is that it isn't going to happen. And it would sort of go against my sort of personal view that broadly people should be encouraged to do things, obviously, to do them in a responsible fashion. And I wonder if, similar to what we were talking about in the previous episode, it's more a question of education than it is of of stopping people from doing it all together.
Amy Green: That could well be it. I mean, there are websites. I found one called UK Gold Prospector, which has information about different areas where you can find gold in the UK and the laws and permits and how to pan and all these kind of things. So resources like that could just be quite useful. They've even got, yeah, they've got loads of information on there and I'm guessing there must be some other online forums where people talk about it and how to go about it and there's always going to be like a seedy underbelly to any of these things isn't there? There's always going to be the people that don't care about doing it ethically, morally, making sure that they're not causing harm to other parts of the landscape which they're in, all these kind of things, the same as there is for everything.
George Browne: Yeah, and it becomes a question of self-policing as well, you know, within the community and, you know, if there isn't the social pressure to do it properly, if the gold panning community is quite disparate, it's going to be difficult for that kind of, those social norms of behaviour to develop. And I guess the same is probably also true of mountain biking, unless you're, engaged with the wider mountain biking community or whatever it happens to be, you're not going to necessarily know, what the conventions are.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, maybe because social media is now affect, social media and AI search, I suppose I should add in there, are the places people learn about these things or get inspired to go and do that thing. Then people only really share the high points on social media. They only show the good times or they want to be perceived to be the expert slash best slash most popular slash most knowledgeable, most adventurous, whatever person in that world. So they show themselves going out to have great times all the time. So that's all that people see about that activity. They don't see any of the impact of it because no one shows it or they don't say I'm not doing this thing or having voluntary restraint because that's not popular. That won't help sell it. That won't help improve their social media profile. Although that said, there are a few people now who sort of adopt the opposite stance to what everyone else is saying on social media. They're being the influencer that says, nope, everyone else is lying to you. This is the truth.
George Browne: Yes, to be the source of truth.
Richard Prideaux: I've got a message here to read out that came in from a friend, which is sort of related to this. So, we live on the edge of a similar forest to Coeda Brennan called Claquinog, and it's a very another big, very big mushroom foraging spot. And you get commercial people harvesting illegally on Natural Resources Wales land. So, is this is the relevance harvesting illegally for commercial purposes mushrooms, so they pick them to sell. sell to restaurants, they drive them, they sell them into Europe. And there are, there are actually organized crime related to this, to mushroom foraging.
George Browne: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: But also there's a lot of voluntary independent stuff on it. So this is the message, anonymized. So true story. So while we were in the woods today at the redacted meetup, 2 unknown boys managed to turn over their car while driving down the redacted rd high above us. The car landed on the roof and they couldn't get out of the crushed doors, so they climbed through the windscreen and then ran away. The boot of the car and rode around were covered in mushrooms, specifically bright red Amanita muscaria. I am guessing there were mixed medicinal mushrooms foraging and drove home high as a kite on liberty caps, so turned the car over with rubbish driving reaction times and then decided to run away so they couldn't get tested for drugs.
George Browne: Wow.
Richard Prideaux: I know as well there have been like rival gang fights in Klecanog Forest over mushroom foraging and turf wars and things.
George Browne: When you say mushroom foraging, you mean illegal mushrooms rather than...
Richard Prideaux: No, sepsum.
George Browne: Really.
Richard Prideaux: Yeah, because people, they are mushroom species, these mushroom species with high culinary value that cannot be cultivated. So you have to find them in the wild, which means you have to go to where they are growing at the right point to get the perfect example. You don't want to get them when they're too small, because when they get bigger, they will get bigger. There'll be more meat there effectively, more mushroom flesh. But if you wait too long, they go mouldy or the insects get to them. So you want to get them exactly the right point, but before someone else gets there. So it's all about timing and access and things like that. When we run mushroom ID courses there, we do not go anywhere near public access. We say to people, right, you are going to be walking a few miles because anywhere you can park, the area around it has been stripped clean.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: And a lot of this is people picking it to sell, but to pick things to sell without the landowner's permission is theft.
George Browne: Yeah.
Richard Prideaux: So it is illegal by definition. But it's sort of illegal in the same way this guy panning for gold was illegal. It's sort of, if you could be willing to go through all the things required to prosecute, you could do it, but it would be more expensive to prosecute than let it happen.
George Browne: Well, I think this is probably my biggest problem with it is that the cost of prosecuting this bloke, I feel probably outweighs the benefit to the natural resource in the long run. I just can't believe that there are enough people panning for gold or enough people who are prepared to pan for gold that it's going to have a significant negative impact on the environment there. And I would probably have rather that they'd spent the money on, for example, getting on the water companies or tracking down some sewage pollution or some runoff from a farm or something like that, it strikes me that would probably have a greater impact in the long term and probably the short term. Just seems like a strange use of public money. And it can't have been cheap to prosecute this guy.
Richard Prideaux: No. I wonder in terms of press, it's had quite it's had more press reach than a public information film of don't do it.
George Browne: That's true.
Richard Prideaux: You know, this is gone, this has gone out internationally. So that it gets more attention with this. If something sounds a bit mad, then it's more likely to hear a broader audience.
Amy Green: I mean, anything about gold is going to spike interest. I wonder though, whether that may have backfired slightly on them in that they perhaps wanted people to see the fact that they were prosecuting based on the impact on fisheries, where most people are just saying it's all to do with the fact that it's gold and that you wanted the gold.
George Browne: Yeah.
Amy Green: Judging from like some of the comments on Facebook that I've seen regarding it, it's either you could do this, but you can't stop sewage going into rivers or it's you just bothered because he's taking your gold. You know, those seem to be the ones. So It's not, it's probably not the message that they wanted to send. They probably wanted to have a big win related to a wildlife crime prosecution, which is what it is at the end of the day. But yeah. so it's an interesting one.
Richard Prideaux: So once again, we have resolved absolutely nothing. We have asked a lot of questions.
George Browne: I don't know if we're here to resolve things. I think we're here. We're just asking questions like all of those ghastly influencer chaps in the manuscript, just asking questions. I don't know. I think there is a, there is a, it's sort of a wider theme that we always come to, which is how do you balance these things against each other? And I do think, you know, it's clear, you know, that this guy in particular didn't give a damn. You know, he's done it before. Several times, he's ignored the rules. And I guess when people are like that, you do have to slap the wrist and say, don't do it again.
Richard Prideaux: So when was the last time you fined? 2022, 23, something like that.
Amy Green: He was sentenced in 2022, yeah. And he was also caught in 2024, but it doesn't say that they were prosecuted by the side.
Richard Prideaux: At some point, is he actually, is this a cost of doing business? Is he making enough money from the gold?
Amy Green: I mean, maybe.
George Browne: It can't be.
Amy Green: Also, what do you do when you find gold? Because if it belongs to Crown Estate, does that mean that if you find any tiny flakes of gold, you can't keep them?
George Browne: I think it might come down to selling. So I think, for example, if you found a load of, if you found enough gold and you wanted to make yourself a ring from it, you could probably do that and get away with it. But I think if you wanted to sell it, I think that's where the issue would come in. And I don't know, do people, are there sort of, rogue jewellers out there buying moody gold off people? I don't know. Who knows?
Richard Prideaux: Maybe if you melt it down, mix it in with some other stuff as well. Go to cash converters and buy some cheap gold jewellery. And just sort of adulterate it with something else so then you can get it across. I probably shouldn't give people ideas. Anyone who's already thought of this has already knows more about this than I do and I'm an idiot.
George Browne: Yes, well, before we do encourage people to commit crimes, should we call it a day?
Richard Prideaux: I think it's a good benchmark, isn't it, for the show? Don't break the law. There you go. So there we are. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you for being here once again. And there's more on the Sidecountry website if you go to sidecountry.co.uk and you can find out more about the show, more about what we're trying to achieve here, more about who we are and lots of other fantastic resources. Bye.
George Browne: Bye. Bye.