Gold Diggers Revive French Exploration as Prices Drive Hunt
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In a field near Saint-Pierre-Montlimart, a small hamlet with a turreted church in western France, Jack Testard and Patrick Lebret dig up some earth with an agronomic drill and put it in a plastic bag.
The president and the chief geologist of a French mining exploration startup owned by Australia’s Variscan Mines Ltd will send dirt samples from the field, which is in an area that was home to a gold mine until 1952, to a laboratory in southern France to look for “mineral anomalies” the company is betting will show evidence of the precious metal.