The world’s most famous silver sands – at least to those who know about these things – are probably those at Fontainebleau, a forest just south of Paris. The famous glass pyramid at the Louvre is made of Fontainebleau sand. There are silver sands in Mol in Belgium, in Maastricht in the Netherlands and Lippe in Germany, as well as in Canada, the US, Brazil and other corners of the world. But while they are not exactly scarce, nor are they commonplace. Some countries have no such sands; that, indeed, was the assumption in Britain for a long time, until the discovery of Lochaline about a century
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