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.
Every road on this project leads to the same place. The gold is on private land. The research is done, the geology is understood, the law is clear, and none of it matters without permission from a person whose name you do not yet know.
So this post is about the unglamorous part.
Step one: pick ground worth asking about
Do not scatter letters. A landowner’s answer is largely determined by whether you sound like you know what you are doing, and asking about a stream with no published evidence tells them immediately that you do not.
On the published record, these are the streams worth the postage:
Small tributaries between the lower Erme and the Avon. The BGS ran a dedicated gold programme over exactly this belt and found repeated drainage anomalies. Critically, they found gold grains in the streams average three times the diameter of grains in the overburden on the slopes: the valley floors are where the recoverable material is.
Combes draining the ground south-west of Holbeton. The strongest documented occurrence anywhere near Dartmoor, with dendritic palladium-bearing gold abundant enough that BGS drilled four boreholes. This is also the most likely to have been asked before, and the most likely to get a wary answer.
Streams cutting the Newton St Cyres Breccia around Smallbrook. North of the moor, in the Crediton Trough. BGS interpret the breccia as a fossil placer being eroded by the modern stream, which is textbook panning ground and almost entirely unknown to hobbyists.
Streams on the Bow Breccia near Deckport and Solland, west of Hatherleigh. Same logic, different formation.
Note what is absent: anything on the open moor. That is covered in the byelaw post.
Step two: find out who owns it
Three methods, in increasing order of effort.
- Land Registry title search. A few pounds online gets you the registered proprietor of a title. You need a rough location; the map search will do the rest. Not everything in rural Devon is registered, but most of it now is.
- Ask locally. The parish council, the village shop, the pub. In farming country, knowing whose field is whose is ordinary local knowledge, and a person who has been pointed at you by a neighbour starts from a better position than a cold letter.
- Walk the footpath first. Entirely lawful, gives you the lie of the land, and often the farm name is on a gate.
Two complications specific to Dartmoor. Around a third of the National Park is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, which is an institution rather than a farmer and has its own processes. And mineral rights in Devon are frequently severed from surface ownership: the person farming the field may genuinely not control what is under it.
Step three: write the letter
The single biggest cause of refusal, I suspect, is that “prospecting for gold” conjures a digger, a sluice, a mess and a liability. Your job is to replace that picture with an accurate one before they have finished the first paragraph.
Things worth saying explicitly:
- What you physically want to do. A few buckets of gravel from the stream bed, washed by hand in a pan, on foot. No machinery, no pumps, no sluices.
- That you will not touch the banks. Bank digging causes erosion and risks offences involving otters, water voles and kingfishers. Saying this unprompted signals that you know what you are doing.
- That you will fill in every hole. And that you will work one small spot at a time.
- When, and for how long. “One day, a Saturday in September” is a far smaller ask than open-ended access.
- That you will show them anything you find. And be genuine about it, most people are curious about their own land.
- Insurance, if you have it. Public liability cover through a club or association removes an objection before it is raised.
- That the gold legally belongs to the Crown anyway, so you are not asking them to give away something valuable. This is true, it is disarming, and it reframes the whole request as scientific curiosity rather than extraction.
- Your contact details, and an easy no. Offer them the option of simply not replying.
Keep it to one side of paper. Send it by post, not email, if you can find an address, in this context it reads as more serious, not less.
Step four: be the person they let back
If you get a yes:
- Turn up when you said, park where you were told, shut every gate.
- Avoid lambing, harvest, and any time there is stock in the field you are crossing.
- Do not bring six friends.
- Send a note afterwards saying what you found, even if it was nothing. Especially if it was nothing.
The realistic prize here is not gold. It is becoming the person who is allowed to come back, because a stream you can sample repeatedly across a season is worth more than a dozen one-off visits to better ground.
And if the answer is no
It usually will be, at least at first, and it is not personal. Farming has had a difficult few years and an unknown person asking to dig in a watercourse is an easy no.
The alternative that costs nothing: a commercial site, where the permissions are already sorted and you can find out whether you actually enjoy this before you spend a winter writing letters. Which, honestly, is where anyone sensible should start anyway.