Golden Cap

It’s the highest point on the south coast of England. I’ve climbed it twice and it’s a bugger when you’re carrying a rucksack. Today I’m carrying a fair weight up the highest point in the Redbank Nature Reserve to find gold. Amazing analogy? Carefully crafted comparison? Pretentious prattle?

Any road, Stu cooked breakfast at 8.30 this morning and I pushed off an hour later. Just a short drive, around two miles, north to Redbank. Then a steep and lengthy five hour climb, detecting on the way where I could. Aiming for the summit, marked by the Red Cross.

It was raining. I liked it. It was cooler. I loved it. The forest felt greener as a result. It would rain for the rest of the day.

I climbed and I climbed. All the way up were periodic gold workings from the 1850s. The key to gold is quartz. Where we find reefs of quartz we can find gold, and there was plenty of quartz on the surface.

However as I climbed higher the gold workings became deeper and deeper, until one was so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom. It had to be at least twenty metres deep. One slip and you don’t get out.

The mullock heaps around these workings were huge, like mini-colliery slag heaps, but cleaner. I realised that the quartz reefs were deeper underground and that the quartz that I had seen on the surface had been brought up from below and run down the mountain from these mullock heaps, over the last hundred and seventy years. This meant that the gold would not be lying about on the surface. It was down below.

I thought that if I climbed higher the reefs might come up, or there may be other reefs close to the surface. I was right. As I climbed up towards the summit the workings became shallower and the mullock heaps lower.

I detected all the way up. Without any gold. But loads of shotgun pellets, bullets and old timers’ nails. Again. At the top the views were great, if a bit cloudy.

Over the back of the summit the ground fell away even more steeply.

And incredibly there were gold workings on the top and most of the way down. I couldn’t believe that I didn’t cop some gold. There were quartz reefs appearing down the side of the mountain as I slid down.

I followed a gully, using my detector on the descent. Towards the bottom the gully became too steep, so I climbed up over a ridge to the west and dropped down a more manageable slope. It was still raining and I was comfortable with the freshness of it. Reaching a track I turned westwards and walked on a winding uphill and downdale route back to the car. No gold yet, but a wonderful day of exercise in decent weather conditions. I was soaked!

I’ve collected a lot of scrap from the old timers. This is just a small part of it.

Tomorrow might be the day!

Night night.