Bancroft, the mineral capital of Canada

Ontario writes its collecting rule down, which is rarer than it should be, and the rule is generous but exact. Every rock and mineral in the province is originally owned by the Crown. Hobby collecting is permitted where the collecting is for personal pleasure or interest, the samples go into your own collection, and the amount does not exceed what one person can excavate using hand tools only and carry unassisted from a site in one trip. The ministry lists what counts as a hand tool: crowbars, picks, shovels, pans, sledgehammers, geological hammers and chisels. It also asks you to spread your visits around the calendar instead of working one spot repeatedly.

The part people skip is the land status. Surface rights and mining rights can be held separately, and the collector is responsible for working out who holds what before setting foot on anything. Unpatented claims, leases, freehold patents, licences of occupation and aggregate permits are all live interests. Without the holder's consent you may be trespassing, and the ministry says so plainly.

The geology repays the homework. This is Grenville ground, and the pegmatites around Bancroft have produced an unusual span of species. The Beryl Pit at Quadeville, worked under half a dozen names since the 1920s and once run as Canadian Beryllium Mines and Alloys, is listed by the Ontario Geological Survey with beryl and mineral specimens as its primary commodities and feldspar, fluorite, rare earths, zircon, thorium and uranium behind them. The survey's record even gives driving directions from the store in Quadeville.

The town leans into it. Bancroft sits on the York River in Hastings County, settled in the 1850s by Loyalist descendants and by Irish families arriving after the Famine, drawn by free hundred-acre parcels advertised in Britain. Mining was the primary industry from the mid-1950s until about 1982. The permanent population is around 4,000; roughly 150,000 people visit each year.