Hi gang,
I’m doing some research on historic garnet production.
Apparently there were some sources of garnet in Scotland and Sweden,
even relatively recently. Anybody know anything about them, or if
they’re still being worked?
Regards,
Brian
Hi Brian,
I’ll contact on you behalf, he’s a friend that spends a lot of
dollars in the pursuit of creating historical replicas.
He showed me some “Roman quality” garnets the other day.
Regards Charles A.
Hi Brian,
You can do a search on mindat.org. It showed me three locations in
Scotland and one in Sweden. Just search on plain garnet (not garnet
group) on the al[alphabetical list and then look at the map at the
bottom of the page and click on the crystal in the area of the world
you are interested in.
Cheers,
Karen
I did my independent geological mapping as an undergraduate on the
north coast of Scotland at a place called Loch Eriboll and stayed in
a small town called Tongue. There were fishermen there who would go
out to a small island and collect garnets from the metamorphic rocks
and sell them to tourists. I had a small bag of them and tumble
polished them as they were really too small for me to cut. Once
polished they had reasonable clarity but too many flaws to be worth
collecting commercially for faceting. I also had a couple of
specimens of augen gneiss from Sweden that had huge garnets in but
again these were highly included. I’m sure that in victorian times
they would have been good enough for much of the garnet jewellery
that used a large number of small stones (quantity rather than the
quality).
I dont know of anyone who currently collects them for cutting but I
have a number of simple square cut faceted garnets that were
collected and cut by an amateur faceter who died a few years ago and
I bought most of his stuff. I cannot be certain of the origin of the
rough though but his widow said he collected it locally to him in
the highlands of Scotland.
Nick Royall