Polelle-Wanganui Project
In December 2023, Castle signed a Heads of Agreement with Great Boulder (GBR) for an option to acquire 75% of Castle Minerals’ (ASX:CDT) Polelle and Wanganui Gold Projects at Meekatharra. The large Polelle Project is located south of GBR’s flagship Side Well Project in a similar geological and structural setting and 7km from Westgold’s (ASX:WGX) Bluebird mill.
Castle Minerals Managing Director, Stephen Stone, commented: “With Castle’s focus on fasttracking its Kambale Graphite Project, aligning the Polelle and Wanganui Projects with the Side Well Project is the logical way forward. We have closely followed the impressive developments at Side Well and believe that combining these extensive and prospective projects substantially increases the opportunity to establish a critical mass of resources in this very under-explored eastern region of the prolific Meekatharra gold camp.”
For more information, see ASX release dated 30 November 2023.
The Polelle project (E51/1843, 144.5km²) lies 25km south of Meekatharra and 7km southeast of the operating Bluebird Mine. It also is 15km south of the Great Boulder Resources’ (ASX: GBR) Side Well gold project and its 5.1km-long Mulga Bill intrusive related anomaly where it is having great success in delineating a gold discovery.
Polelle hosts a mainly obscured and minimally explored greenstone belt comprising a combination of prospective lithological units and major structural features. This includes the Albury Heath shear which hosts the Albury Heath deposit (Inferred Resource of 528,000t at 2.09g/t Au for 35,479oz Au) immediately adjacent to the east boundary of the licence. Aeromagnetics have indicated that the southwest trending Albury Heath shear is traceable onto the Polelle project area for some 7.5km.
Given the close association of gold anomalism with these structures and the success being achieved by Great Boulder, the scope for exploration success at Polelle is considered to be strong. An anomalous zone of copper mineralisation associated with underlying mafic rocks and a splay off the Albury Shear also provides an attractive target, along with nickel cobalt anomalism over underlying ultramafic rocks.
The Wanganui project (E51/1703, 18.4km²) lies 33km south-west of the active Meekatharra mining centre and 15km south-west of the operating Bluebird gold mine.
In 2002, when the gold price was much lower than present, these were partially open-pit mined to recover shallow oxide ore to a depth of approximately 30m. Very little previous work has been focused on testing for the possibility of deeper mineralisation below the supergene oxidised zone.
Deep RC drilling (2020) by Castle has demonstrated the likelihood for the development of high grade gold shoots below the North and South Open Pits as well as at other targets along the Main Lode Shear zone.
The Main Lode mineralisation, which can be intermittently traced for at least 1km, is one of at least four sub-parallel, northeast striking and structurally analogous mineralised zones. The others are the East Lode, the Far East Lode and the Queenslander reef line where anomalous mineralisation has been confirmed over 1km, 400m and 200m respectively. This part of the licence encompasses a part of the eastern flank of the Meekatharra-Wyloo Greenstone, a largely underexplored region due to its extensive soil cover.