Hemerdon: the one that is actually operating
Just outside the National Park boundary near Plympton sits Hemerdon, also known as Drakelands: a large open-pit tungsten and tin mine on a granite cupola related to the Dartmoor batholith.
The bare facts:
- Worked at intervals since 1918, including through both world wars when tungsten was strategically critical.
- Redeveloped by Australia’s Wolf Minerals, which took it into production and then into administration in 2018.
- Acquired by Tungsten West in 2019, with interim operations from 2023.
- Now holds EU strategic project status, with a $25m bridging loan secured and a larger facility of up to $85m in documentation, aiming at fines gravity processing in Q3 2026 and full plant commissioning in early 2027 Tungsten West plc / trade press 2026.
- Recruitment of more than 120 staff planned through 2026.
It is one of the largest tungsten resources in the world outside China, and the economics have been transformed by tungsten prices rising sharply through 2026 on defence and strategic demand.
The wider South West revival
Hemerdon is not an outlier. The whole province is in the middle of its first serious mining revival in a century, driven by critical-minerals policy rather than precious metals:
- South Crofty, near Redruth in Cornwall, is in construction to restart tin production, the only primary tin mine in Europe. Cornish Metals holds mining and exploration licences running to 2071 across 1,490 hectares and 26 former mines, with the UK’s National Wealth Fund taking a major stake and production targeted from 2028.
- Cornish Lithium has produced lithium hydroxide from Cornish geothermal brines and hard rock, reportedly the first time it has been made in Britain outside a laboratory.
- Government has put substantial public money behind Cornish tin, on strategic supply-chain grounds.
None of this is gold. There is no gold mine, no gold exploration licence, and no gold-focused company operating in Devon. That absence is a data point in itself: the BGS published everything they found in the 1990s, the reports have been freely downloadable for years, and in three decades of rising gold prices no one has staked a commercial position on them.
What a permitted operation actually requires
Worth spelling out, because “could I mine gold on Dartmoor?” deserves a concrete answer. To extract gold lawfully and at scale you would need, at minimum:
- An option or lease of Mines Royal from The Crown Estate, which requires demonstrating financial standing, environmental credentials, marketing outlets, and operational and restoration proposals The Crown Estate.
- Mineral rights or an agreement with whoever holds them, frequently severed from surface ownership in Devon, and often the Duchy of Cornwall on Dartmoor Duchy of Cornwall.
- Planning permission from the mineral planning authority. Inside the National Park that is Dartmoor National Park Authority, whose statutory purpose is conserving the landscape. The realistic prospect of consent for a new metal mine inside the Park is close to nil.
- Environmental permits from the Environment Agency, plus habitats assessments for the SAC and SSSI designations that blanket the moor.
- A restoration bond and an agreed closure plan.
- A deposit worth all of that. Hemerdon is a world-scale tungsten resource and it has still been through administration once.
The one thing worth watching
If anything changes the picture, it will not be gold. It will be palladium.
The south Devon occurrences are palladium-bearing, sometimes strikingly so: grains with rims up to 13% Pd, and discrete potarite Leake 1990. Palladium is a critical mineral with a strategic-supply story of exactly the kind that is currently mobilising capital into Cornish tin and lithium.
BGS’s conclusion, though, keeps it in perspective: south Devon mineralisation is “likely to be locally rich, but possibly of limited vertical extent” Leake 1992. Locally rich and shallow is interesting to a scientist and a hobbyist. It is not, on the published evidence, a mine.