Oh, the shimmer of gold. We crave it, we admire it, and we even eat it at extravagant dinners. Well, the largest gold nugget has been found in 2017 in Scotland, and now you can go see it at Glasgow Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University. The precious discovery weighs 85.6g, is estimated to be worth around £50,000 and was found in a river in Perthshire. The man who discovered the gold nugget found it by ‘sniping’, that is when gold hunters lie face down in a river wearing a dry suit.
Apparently, Scottish laws on gold still date back to late-medieval times, and you’d think it would be updated by now. It means anyone who finds a gold nugget like this or any sort of gold at all must hand it over to the Scottish Crown. In this case, the monarchs decided to pass it over to the museum where the gold can be preserved and displayed.
To just find 85 grams of pure gold anywhere around the world is quite rare nowadays, so this could well be the last Scottish gold nugget out there. When people stumble upon gold, the treasure is usually mere gold dust or gold flakes. Nothing like this has been found in the last 400 years, and who knows if it ever will be again in Scotland.