A Scottish Gold Rush

This is the Kildonan Burn, a tributary of the Helmsdale river in Sutherland. In 1868 a local man struck gold in its sediments and a 'gold rush' started after a newspaper picked up the story, with some six hundred prospectors descending on it and the Suisgill Burn.

Many of the prospectors set up camp where the road crosses the burn. This ramshackle settlement of wooden huts became known as Baile an Or, the ‘Town of Gold’.

The prospectors were discouraged by a steady waning of the amount of gold and by local interests, including the Sutherland Estate across whose land the burn flowed, so the rush subsided. However, there is still gold in the burn and, while we were there, we met two men from Ross-Shire who were on their way upstream to try their luck. One of them carried two plastic sieves with wide meshes, which suggested that either he had developed a rather unusual system for panning for gold or that he didn't have a clue what he was doing.