Creating big-day jewelry from the rare Welsh gold has been a royal family tradition since 1923. Now, you could follow suit.
Have you ever dreamed of having a wedding ring just like the ones members of the royal family wear? Now, you have the rare chance to make that dream a reality. Three Welsh gold coins, sourced from the Clogau St David’s gold mine—the very same mine where the royal family has gotten the metal for their wedding rings since 1923—will go up for auction later this month, Hello! reports.
According to Clogau, the first member of the royal family to use Welsh gold in a wedding ring was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, who was later known as Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, when she married the Duke of York (who ultimately came to be known as King George VI) in 1923. Since then, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Prince Charles (now King Charles) and Princess Diana, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles (now Queen Consort Camilla), Prince William and Kate Middleton, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have all exchanged Welsh gold rings from the Clogau St David mine on their wedding days.
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In a previous report CBS noted that some of the more recent royal wedding rings were made from the late Queen Elizabeth II’s back stock of the precious gold—not newly-mined gold. “The queen on her 60th birthday, she got gifted a kilogram of this Welsh gold and she’s been slowly chipping away at it with all these wedding rings ever since,” Bethany Fenn, a source from the National Trust, told the outlet in 2018. The mine has largely been inactive since the late 1990s, Hello! reports, but when a company called Alba Mineral Resources acquired the rights to the mine in 2018, they began working with a subsidiary called Gold Mines of Wales Limited to begin “extensive underground exploration.”
Those efforts paid off: In December of 2024, the mine produced enough gold to mint three “limited-edition Tyn-y-Cornel gold coins,” which will go to auction on Alba Mineral Resources’ website between March 30 and April 4. Each coin is said to be one ounce of pure, 24-carat Welsh gold. The coins feature a Welsh dragon sitting on Cadair Idris on the front and a historical photograph of miners on the back.
Though there’s no word on how much each coin could sell for, gold is currently selling for over $3,000 an ounce; given the rarity of this particular gold, BRIDES editors expect it should fetch far more. If a pure Welsh gold coin isn’t in your budget, there’s another way to take part in the royal tradition of receiving this special metal on your big day: All of Clogau’s jewelry contains some amount of rare Welsh gold. “Welsh gold is possibly the rarest in the world, so we carefully make sure to include only a small amount within each piece of Clogau jewellery,” the brand’s managing director told Hello!. “Our goal is to help preserve the longevity of Welsh gold, whilst keeping Clogau affordable and accessible.”
