Devon · An open research project
There is gold in and around Dartmoor.
Almost none of it is where you would expect.
This project pulls together the British Geological Survey's own exploration reports, seven centuries of documentary history, and the current law on prospecting, to answer one question honestly: where could a person actually go looking for gold in this corner of Devon, and would they be allowed to?
44 / 450
BGS drainage sites in the South Hams where panned concentrate exceeded 0.5 ppm gold. Gold is genuinely widespread here, south of the moor.
8.6
Grains of gold per ton, the best result from Brammall's 1920s assays of the Dartmoor granite itself. That is a trace, not a deposit.
£500
Maximum fine under the Dartmoor byelaw for displacing soil or stones on access land, which is what panning a moorland stream involves.
0
Recreational gold-panning licences currently issued by The Crown Estate in England. The gold is the Crown's whether you find it or not.
The short version
The Dartmoor granite is not a gold deposit and never was. What makes this area interesting is the ring of much older and much younger rocks around it: the Devonian slates and volcanics to the south, and the Permian red beds to the north, where the BGS found gold grains so delicate and so chemically distinctive that they rewrote the model for how gold forms in southern Britain.
The catch is that essentially all of that ground is enclosed private farmland, while the ground you are legally free to walk on, the open commons of the National Park, is precisely where the byelaws forbid you to disturb anything, and where a good deal of the promising valley floor is a Scheduled Monument.
So the honest recommendation is not a grid reference. It is a sequence: learn the technique somewhere you are welcome, understand exactly what you are and are not allowed to do, and then approach the small number of landowners whose streams the geology actually favours.
Where the targets are
Every marker is an interpretation of published evidence, colour-coded by what we think you may lawfully do there. Click any of them.
1 you can simply go and do 4 need a landowner's permission 6 you should look at but not dig
Start here
The geology
Why the granite everyone associates with Dartmoor is the wrong rock to look at, and where the gold actually comes from.
Read →The history
From a Crown claim in the 1260s and tinners hiding flakes in bird quills, to the Victorian ventures that recovered nothing at all.
Read →The law
The Crown owns the gold. The Duchy owns much of the ground. A byelaw covers the rest. What that means for you in practice.
Read →Access and the ranges
Open access commons, private farmland and three live-firing ranges, and how to tell which one you are standing on.
Read →How to pan
The technique, the kit, where in a stream the gold sits, and how to leave a watercourse as you found it.
Read →Identifying gold
Gold, or mica, or pyrite, or brass? Four field tests that settle it, and what Devon gold looks like specifically.
Read →From the notebook
Research is published as it happens, working notes and all.
- How to ask a landowner, and which streams to ask about The whole project comes down to a letter. Here is how to work out who to send it to, what to put in it, and the three or four streams that justify the effort.
- Mapping Dartmoor without Ordnance Survey Every good map of Dartmoor is an OS map, and OS mapping cannot be republished. Here is how the maps on this site were built from open data instead, and what was lost along the way.
- Bampfylde, 1854: what happens when you believe your best assay Victorian Devon had rich gold assays, imported American technology and serious money. The bulk processing recovered nothing at all. It is the most useful failure in the county's mining history.
- The byelaw nobody mentions Most guides to UK gold panning discuss Crown ownership and landowner permission. On Dartmoor there is a third rule that matters more than either, and it is barely three lines long.
- Why the granite is a red herring Everyone starts a Dartmoor gold search by looking at the granite. Three days in the BGS archive suggest that is exactly the wrong place to begin.