Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

On the advice of the Revd Professor William Buckland, of Oxford, it was his intention to explore 'the banks of the Wye between Hay and Builth', but his route was somewhat circuitous, and on his way he visited another clerical geologist, the Revd William Daniel Conybeare, 1787-1857, who, since 1823, had been the rector of Sully, an undemanding country parish on the Glamorgan coast. From 1844, until is death in 1857, he was dean of Llandaff, where he is gratefully remembered as much for restoring his sadly dilapidated cathedral as he is as a pioneer in the modem study of geology. From Sully. the Murchisons continued on their way by travelling westwards through Swansea to Llandovery, and then north eastwards, along the valleys of the Towy and Usk, to Brecon, and then on to meet the Wye at Glasbury and Hay, all the time gathering geological specimens, making drawings, and filling numerous notebooks with careful observations. By the middle of July they were on the Radnorshire-Herefordshire border at Harpton Court, the spacious home of Thomas Frankland Lewis, MP, 1780- 1855, where they also met his son, George Comewall Lewis, 1806-63, who graduated from Christ Church, Oxford with a first in classics and a second in mathematics, and, at the age of 25, was about to be called to the bar. It was he, Murchison wrote, recollecting in tranquillity in 1859, who 'first urged me to put together all my geological records of this region, and form the work afterwards called the Silurian System.'3 The Murchisons also met James Davies, 1777-1856, and Richard Banks, 1791-1871, at Harpton. James Davies, Frankland Lewis's brother-in-law, was a prosperous lawyer and Clerk of the Peace for the county of Radnor. He was also a founder of the highly successful Kington and Radnorshire Bank. Richard Banks came from Kent, where his family had some expertise at smuggling, to Kington in the summer of 1814, as a newly qualified lawyer, to join James Davies. He became Davies's partner and, in 1817, married his niece, an event that also linked him by marriage to the Lewises. The conversation, when the Murchisons, the Lewises, Davies, and Banks all met at Harpton, inevitably turned to geology and mention was made of the interest of a local doctor in the subject. This was John Mitchell, 1781- 1841, MRCS, whose interest in geology was probably related to the growing awareness of the medicinal properties of local wells, which culminated in the 19th C burgeoning of spas like Llandrindod Wells.4 The Murchisons met John Mitchell on July 15th 1831, and he showed them the fossils he had gathered from the local limestone and suggested they should visit the Revd Thomas Taylor Lewis, MA, 1801-1858, the curate of Aymestrey, who was to play so prominent a part in assisting Murchison.5 Mitchell shared this interest in geology with two other local medical practitioners, Dr Thomas Lloyd of Ludlow, 1802-49, the senior physician at