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One spring morning in 1854 Mr Goodman, the original director of the Clogau (pronounced “clog-eye”) copper mine, casually picked-up a piece of waste rock and broke it in two. As he expected, the cracked fragments showed no trace of copper. What he didn’t expect was the glittering yellow metal that was revealed. From that day on, the abandoned copper mine was given a rich new life.
The first seam from the Clogau St. David’s Gold Mine produced a very beautiful Welsh rose gold. Production continued until 1995 when it became too difficult and uneconomical to mine. The miners who worked there up until the closure were the direct descendants of those original Victorian prospectors. The mine now lies inactive, and although we tried to open it as a tourist attraction, that too has proved impractical on safety grounds.
The small, though steady, supply of gold extracted from the Clogau seams has made it perhaps the rarest in the world. Clogau Gold jewellery is made with a touch of our diminishing stock of Clogau Welsh gold and we don’t have much left.
Indeed, to re-open the mine now and extract gold would cost six times as much as the value of other gold. This is why we only include a small amount of this Royally sought precious metal. This makes Clogau Gold jewellery not only special but also affordable.
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