The work of stripping out the museum has required precision and delicacy as can be seen in the picture (above) of the removal of the original cases but this stage is now complete with absolutely no damage. The building will be shrouded in scaffolding as the building and landscaping work continues.
William Smith, whose pioneering work established that geological strata could be identified and correlated using the fossils they contain, has been dubbed ‘Father of English Geology’. One of his geological maps of England now hangs in Burlington House, London, the home of the Geological Society.
Smith came to Scarborough after his release from debtors’ prison where the dramatic coastline offered him an area of geological richness. The Rotunda Museum was built to Smith’s design suggestion and the original display of fossils illustrated his ideas.
The Rotunda is one of the oldest purpose built museums in Britain still fulfilling its original role. Overlooking Scarborough’s South Bay this small, handsome building
is an important part of Britain’s scientific heritage. MORE >
The dinner was attended by most of the important people in Scarborough at the time including Mr. Bailiff Fowler, Mr. Strickland, three Mr. Woodalls, four Mr. Travis’s and two Reverend Irvins. MORE >
His ancestor, Sir John Johnstone, was President of the Scarborough Philosophical Society which raised the money to build the Rotunda and consulted Smith as to the Museum’s design.
Still in his twenties, Sir John was an intellectual leader in Scarborough in the 1820s and a staunch supporter of Smith and his ideas. He donated the Hackness stone of which the Rotunda Museum is built.
Sir John Johnstone became Smith’s patron and employed him as his Land Steward at Hackness.MORE >
The spring water was filtered through the rock of the cliff side picking up magnesium sulphate along the way. The water had a similar effect to modern proprietary medicines like Andrews’s Liver Salts. Mrs Farrow had discovered a cure for constipation, an ailment that afflicted many wealthy people at that time. Scarborough was reborn as a fashionable spa town visited by the great and the wealthy from all over the country. MORE >
The new Rotunda Museum Project will offer 400 opportunities for people to learn directly from the specialists involved in the redevelopment of the museum.MORE >
Erosion of the massive cliffs reveals an array of spectacular fossils. The deep valleys formed during the last Ice Age give many inland exposures and spectacular beauty spots. The wide range of fossils provides evidence for the changing environment of tropical seas, rivers and swamps in theMORE >
And if anyone had mentioned the name William Smith, our teacher would have looked as blank as any other inhabitant of Scarborough.
It was very different in 1829. Back then, Scarborough was the fashionable resort of the cream of Yorkshire Society. The Rotunda was a strikingly modern structure with a cutting-edge display of geology, a craze then sweeping the country.
Smith was the ‘Father of English geology’ and a figure of international importance, for the science of reading rocks revolutionised our understanding of the creation of the world. It is this that makes the Rotunda so important.
Today there is no longer any excuse for pulling a blank face to the name of “Strata Smith”, not since the publication of Simon Winchester’s ‘The Map That Changed the World” in 2001
As Winchester makes clear, for Smith, Scarborough, with layer upon layer of rocks clearly visible in the cliffs of Castle Hill and along the coast, was ideal geological territory. It was also a refuge for a man who had been nearly broken by his obsession.
A humble surveyor, the son of a country blacksmith, Smith had struggled against the suspicion of the more gently-born members of the Geological Society to publish the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815. Bankruptcy, a mentally unbalanced wife and self-imposed exile from London had blighted Smith’s life and eventually he had washed up in Scarborough.’
Giles Worsley
Daily Telegraph
22 July 2004.
