We then were taken to a gold-panning  demo where they use mercury to form an amalgam with crushed ore. This is squeezed thro a fine cloth mesh to express the mercury out of the mixture and the residual sludge is picked through to find small gold nuggets. This is a different technique to that used in rivers. The remaining sludge is then sold on to companies for more refined recovery of further gold residues. Not really sure this was a legal set-up!
Afraid no pics of this.

NON-POTTERS BEWARE!

And then to a small pottery which was interesting to us. Very different to the pottery we are trying to learn in Symondsbury.

Jenny uses a much softer clay mix - fine sand is mixed with the clay to make it very malleable

She uses a small oven with broken shards of terracotta to retain the heat. This is heated with charcoal in the oven itself to a temperature of only 500 deg C as compared with the usual temp of well over 1000 deg C