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Please click on the pictures to enlarge.

We managed to make our usual March trip to Eastern Scotland this year and did quite well. An enjoyable highlight to the week was the company on one day of Kenneth Steven, the distinguished Scottish writer and author of the poem which appears on this site. Kenneth had long wanted to join us on an agate-collecting foray so we took him to a field on the flank of Norman's Law, where he had a whale of a time and found a fine stalactitic/fortification agate 15 cm. across. We were able to introduce him to some of the finer points of collecting on fields, such as how to recognise potential hotspots by their association with slight humps and ridges, or subtle variations in the colour of the soil.

Due to family problems we weren't able to make our usual collecting trip to Dunure in early April, but visited Burn Anne in July as we had heard that the three collectors who had had a JCB in there had dumped a lot of waste material in the burn, and we thought they might have missed something. It was a typical summer's day: cold and throwing it down with rain and the burn was bank-high and the colour of cocoa. However, on the surface of the neatly filled-in excavation there were a number of pieces of agate lying around, including the one pictured.

Our favourite collecting fields were of course high in crop at that time of year, but quite by chance we discovered a new site which provided us with some of the most beautiful agates we've yet seen (pictures above). As it's on private land and out of consideration of the landowner we don't want to say exactly where it is, but it's somewhere in Ayrshire! The point is that it's still possible to discover exciting new collecting sites if one is prepared to look away from the well-known and well-worn places.

We can supply standard or custom size cabochons of Scottish agates and other British stones, also some lovely Australian opal; we can also supply finished jewellery items. Ask us for details.

Cabochons For Jewellery

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