O'Klondike! Stand by for a new gold rush as a glittering lode worth £450m is found under a tiny Irish village



It could be enough to trigger a Klondike-style gold rush.



Prospectors claim to have discovered the biggest gold reserve ever found in the British Isles - deep beneath an Irish village.

They said nearly half-a-billion pounds of the precious metal could lie in the rolling County Monaghan countryside and predicted that a mine could open in three years' time.

Clontibret, Co Monaghan, close to the Irish border, has more than one million ounces of gold

Ireland experienced its first gold rush in 1795, and ever since there have been efforts to find commercially-viable reserves.

Now soaring world commodity prices have convinced a tiny Dublin-based operation that it can succeed where others have failed.

The claims for the reserve have been made by Conroy Diamonds and Gold, the brainchild of former Irish senator and physiology lecturer Professor Richard Conroy.

A veteran explorer after decades spent searching for oil, gems and

precious metals, he has long been convinced that beneath the village of Clontibret, close to the Northern Irish border, lies a massive amount of gold.

Deposits in the village could be worth as much as £450 million



Yesterday his firm unveiled a study by independent mining consultants estimating the total amount at just over a million ounces.

With the price of gold at around £450 an ounce - having more than trebled over six years - that would make the reserve worth up to £450million.

But amateur prospectors thinking of recreating the sort of frenzied scenes experienced around Canada's Klondike river in the 1890s - when 100,000 fortune-seekers descended to pan for gold - can think again.

The most promising sites lie hundreds of feet underground, and Irish law means any flakes found would be property of the government there anyway.

And experts point out that the company's claims are broad estimates based on drilling and that most of the gold is of low-grade standard.

Gold-digger: A Klondike prospector in the late 1890s

Even Professor Conroy admits that extracting the gold would cost around two-thirds of its total value, but he is optimistic that commercial mining will happen.

'A lot more work needs to be done, but I think we will go ahead, and if we do then it will be on a far bigger scale than any previous gold mine in Ireland or the UK,' he said.

His company's claims for the amount of gold beneath Clontibret are based on geological surveys, trench-digging and drilling.

Further exploration is required to see if the professor can attract the multi-million pound funding needed to start mining, however.

In the Klondike, while a few prospered, most prospectors faced hardship, starvation and extreme cold, and thousands died.

The declaration is expected to attract interest from major international players in the gold mining industry and raise hopes in the historically deprived border region

And the lessons from Ireland's own 18th century gold rush are not hopeful - after reports of finds in streams in County Wicklow in September 1795, hundreds converged to try their luck. But while one 22oz nugget was found, the frenzy quickly petered out.

In north Wales thousands worked in gold mines in Victorian times, and Welsh gold was used to produce-wedding rings for royal brides for decades, but that has dwindled to next-to-nothing. But there are other signs of a revival - Scotland's Cononish gold mine could restart extraction as a result of the rise in commodity prices.

And Ireland already has one working gold mine, near Omagh, 30 miles from the spot targeted by Professor Conroy, where millions of pounds are being invested with the aim of producing 30,000 ounces a year.

Geologists mapping the island have said they would be 'very disappointed' if significant finds of gold were not made.