The company drilling for gold in the Highlands says Scotland has yet to wake up to a potentially wealthy new industry on its doorstep.

Scotgold Resources, which has planning permission for a mine at Cononish in the Trossachs National Park, says the mine could pave the way for serious exploration of precious metals in Scotland including gold, silver and platinum.

However, it says most countries, including Northern Ireland, have already invested in basic resource mapping which is absent in the rest of the UK.

John Bentley, Scotgold's executive chairman, said: "There are much larger deposits in Northern Ireland with exactly the same geology, but one of the reasons the Irish exploration is more advanced is that the government there has spent £6 million on doing airborne geophysical work. We don't have the data in Scotland, we have to tramp round and do it ourselves."

Mr Bentley, a 40-year industry veteran, has raised debt funding from a South African bank and is now trying to drum up £15m from institutional investors in Edinburgh and London to get the mine into production next year.