The Motherload

My Mate Brian rang me last night. We've had a couple of explorations of a small valley in the North Pennines recently and the last one provided us with lots of things to do - such as poking around in the leadmines and in the rubble of the extensive flood debris that lines the floor of this little dale. One (actually, two) of the things we found were some very large lumps of iron pyrites - fool's gold.... Any road up, Brian had been having yet another poke around this little gem of a place and had found an enormous lump of the stuff - and I'm talking motherload here, or , rather, these were his words. Its quite exciting to find a lovely great lump of shiny rock. The one I found the other day weighed in at just under 4kg, mainly due, I suspect to the damn great lumps of iron in it.

So, here it is in the blog. I'm not going to say exactly where it is, though, partly because some people in a pub seemed over-interested in our samples and there's also some wildlife stuff there which certain other people could well show an unhealthy interest in, specially as the place is quite secluded. The thing is, though - I'm going to have to go back there myself and have a look. Pics include some flood debris (fascinating, I know....) and the cairn (Marshall's Cairn) near the place and samples of the rock we've found.