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Kildare Block

PL 3777 is located in eastern Kildare approximately 8km east of the town of Naas and 1km west of the town of Blessington. It covers an area of 33.54 km2 of low to medium relief rolling hills with land usage dominated by pasture for the rearing of beef and dairy cattle but there also is a significant amount of sand and gravel quarrying.

PL 3777 was applied for by Connemara in late 2005 and was awarded in April 2006 The initial target on this licence is for a shear hosted gold deposit. Historic exploration, had discovered a series float boulders containing very high grade gold mineralisation along a dry valley to south of the hamlet of Tipperkevin. Trenching discovered some localised gold in outcrop associated with small scale shearing, however, diamond drilling only intersected narrow, low grade, auriferous structures. The bulk of the historic exploration effort was concentrated in the one field where the initial discovery had been made. In addition to the trenching and diamond drilling this work included soil sampling, deep overburden sampling and VLF surveying.

Work carried out during 2007 was focused upon the region with very high grade “bonanza” style gold mineralisation located to the south of the hamlet of Tipperkevin. A detailed 2D Resistivity geophysical survey succeeded in defining a series of shear zones along the western margin of the target zone. Unfortunately, the follow up deep overburden / base of till geochemical sampling was not particularly successful confirming that the shears discovered are only poorly auriferous (the peak assay was 159ppb Au).

As part of an ongoing due diligence programme the region to the north of Tipperkevin was revisited and a reconnaissance traverse discovered a piece of quartz float with a very small speck of visible gold. A programme of panning discovered that a number of the screened sand and gravel products contain fine colours of gold, in particular a heap of poor quality silt / sand that is used as pipe bedding. It is apparent that the screening and washing plant on the site is concentrating a certain amount of fine grained free gold. A preliminary examination of the screening plant found that small natural riffle was formed in the fine grained outwash from the wet screen. A sample was collected and panned down, this sample contained a large number of fine colours of gold and one large grain that is just under 3mm in diameter.