There's gold in that there river

THE first introduction Mick Gossage had to gold panning was during a visit to his late wife's cousin. As he walked into the kitchen of their home at Troutbeck, Windermere, Mick could see cousin Alf sitting cross-legged in his back garden on what appeared to be a toadstool.

"It was like a scene from a Walt Disney film," laughs Mick. "He had an old possing tub full of water and a pan and he looked like a gnome. I thought, is this what retirement does to you?'

Alf was deep in concentration, panning some river gravel he had acquired in Scotland. When Mick went to join him, Alf said he was panning for gold and told him to have a go, thrusting the pan into his hands. Mick was unimpressed when all the contents ended up back in the possing tub.

"I said 'there's no gold in there', and he said 'actually there was a gram of gold in that - and you've just lost it'. My first lesson in gold started then."

Mick and a friend duly went off to Scotland and spent the day in a river, panning in the very spot where Alf said they would find gold. But after moving four tonnes of river gravel, they had failed to find any glimpses of yellow and the only thing Mick ended up with was hypothermia.

"I went off to telephone Alf and said 'you've sent us up here on a wild goose chase' and he said 'wait there'," says Mick. "He came the following day and within 20 minutes he was extracting gold. We were gobsmacked and that's when it started to get to us - we thought if he can find it so can we."

It turned out that Mick and his friend had been doing it all wrong, their method being to dig a huge hole and pan like demons.

Twenty years later and Mick, 60, of Richmond, has since learned the art of panning. Gold, he says, is incredibly lazy and tends to find its way into rivers, nestling in the slowest moving part before working its way deep into the gravel.

"Now, I walk a river before I get my pan out," he says. "Then you need to think how the river was 200,000 years ago, you put it altogether in your mind and you think that's where it's going to be. Then you have to extract it."

Like the Californian gold prospectors before them, the kit is much the same. In those days it was a metal sieve pan, a shovel and a mule. Today, it is a hard plastic pan, a shovel and a Ford Mondeo. The hat is optional.

Mick can still remember finding his first nugget as if it were yesterday.

"It was in Wales and I got this flash of yellow," he says, still excited by the recollection. "I looked up and down the river, to make sure no-one was watching and I shook it a bit and it started to leap out of the pan. It was about seven and a half grams. I sat on the bank and looked up and down again - I was so paranoid. I could understand why people in the old days would kill for it. You get fiercely protective - it could have been hundreds of thousands of years old."

Mick's favourite spot for panning is in Scotland (the gold is the prettiest), but unlike 20 years ago, he lets the younger ones do most of the work for him.

"I watch them digging holes all over the river," he laughs. "Then when they've all gone I explore all the holes in which I think there might be gold, so they've done all the work."

You can find flakes of gold in many rivers. While posing for the photograph, Mick even manages to find a speck in the River Swale at Richmond. But he's not revealing where the best haunts are - gold can still have a strange effect on some people and the last thing you need is your peace and quiet destroyed by a gold rush.

"There's gold not 30 miles from here, but it's extremely fine and it's difficult to get," he says, a hint of mischief in his eyes.

"I keep a little tube in my pocket with four or five little flakes in it, and that's what I show people when they come up to me while I'm prospecting. The first question I get asked is 'how much is it worth'? and I say 'tuppence'. Then they say 'it's not worth it" and I say 'no, not really'.

"I never, ever show them what I've found, otherwise they'd all be up there."

His wife, Lin, is very supportive, he says. The couple headed off to the Mennock, in south-west Scotland before they were married and over the course of nine Sundays panned enough gold (8.4grms) for her wedding ring. They made the ring together with the help of a silversmith. Its size has since shrunk to 4.7 grams because it is so pure it has worn away against her engagement ring.

"We'll have to pan for another in a few years," he smiles.

Mick was one of the first people to join the British Goldpanning Association when it formed in 1988 and is a former president. The association began hosting the British Goldpanning Championships and sending people abroad to compete in the world championships. This year, the world championships are being held in South Africa next month, where they are expecting an estimated 1,000 competitors.

Mick, estates and site services manager at Darlington College, has competed across the world in championships and will be going to South Africa. He won a bronze medal in last year's world championships in Slovakia and gold in this year's Scottish Open Championships, as well as gold in both the Scottish and British veterans' classes.

To make the competition fair, each competitor has a bucket with about 45lbs of river gravel which contains between five and 12 pieces of gold. The winner is the one who finds the gold the quickest with a five minute penalty for each piece of gold they miss.

It is clear that gold panning is a serious business. Mick may wear a tie emblazoned with South Park characters and the ring tune on his mobile phone may be sheep baaaaaa-ing to the song Jerusalem, but you have to have your wits about you in the gold game. Mick's committee has had to adapt the rules eight or nine times to combat cheating.

"We've had to stop people from putting their own gold in there in competitions and there are lots of other little tricks," he says.

"One of them is to put washing up liquid in because it stops the gold from floating and you don't want it to float out."

His gold habits have changed over the years. Now, he says, he will prospect for days looking for nuggets, which are rare, rather than fill his test tubes with gold flakes. There are people who make money out of it, but he doesn't fancy standing in rivers in the winter just to pay the bills.

People often ask him what his collection is worth, but it is hard to put a price on it and he's never sold any pieces. For him, it's not about the money, he gets the greatest enjoyment seeing his grandchildren playing with his collection, and talking about gold with other people.

"I have the sheer thrill of finding it and I've never, ever lost gold fever," he says. "You can never take that away. It's like fishing, the next one is always going to be the big one."