The Curious Travellers Project — investigating the life, work, and legacy of the enlightenment travel writer and naturalist Thomas Pennant — began in 2014, but since 2022 a major partner has been the Natural History Museum in London, which holds an extensive collection of Pennant’s natural history specimens, from prehistoric shark teeth to preserved algae. With the current phase of the project drawing to a close at the end of 2025, this seemed like an apt opportunity to not only celebrate the successes of the project, but also to explore what might yet come through collaboration in the future, with a continuing focus on both historical research and community science. Around 60 attendees from a broad swathe of interest areas connected to Pennant met in the Natural History Museum’s new Nature Activity Centre in the fantastic Nature Discovery Garden, which now surrounds the Museum. We were welcomed by Dr Doug Gurr (Museum Director, sadly only able to join us remotely) and Dr Tim Littlewood (Executive Director of Science), setting the scene for a day that focused on the importance of collaboration between the humanities and the sciences.
After Professor Mary-Ann Constantine opened proceedings with a whistle-stop overview of the project, the first session began with an introduction to the editorial work currently taking place on Pennant’s Tours of Wales and Scotland. Alex Deans of Glasgow University kicked us off with an exploration of Pennant’s (not always flattering!) thoughts on the ‘immense morass’ of Caithness on the northern tip of Scotland, whilst Liz Edwards (University of Wales) told us the story of the stuffed ‘little owl’ Pennant encountered in a bird collection at Bryn y Pys Hall in Flintshire — recorded as a favourite of the ‘Athenian goddess’, but also seemingly of Pennant himself, given that it is depicted repeatedly in his personal illustrated volumes.
We couldn’t possibly be at the Natural History Museum without a deep dive into Thomas Pennant’s collections there, so the remainder of the morning was spent celebrating these fascinating specimens, their sometimes murky origins, and their varied uses over the centuries. Mary-Ann Constantine returned to talk about seashells donated from Pennant’s collections, which he gathered and studied with the help of a network of collaborative enthusiasts, from the rambunctious Welsh Morris brothers to the elevated Margaret Bentinck, Duchess of Portland. Stephanie Holt (project researcher at the Museum) then gave us an overview of the Pennant holdings at the Museum and how they arrived there. She outlined the work that is currently in progress exploring narratives of some of these items, taking us towards a ‘Virtual Cabinet of Curiosities’ of the Pennant specimens, which will allow everyone to explore the collections through stories of their procurement, historical use, artistic inspiration, or modern scientific value. More to come on this in the next year!
Odile Kidd then took us in a different disciplinary direction, sharing her perspective on Pennant’s primary illustrator—the lower-class Welsh artist Moses Griffith—from her vantage point as a combined artist and researcher at the NHM. Praise was heaped on the functional detail and artistic beauty in Griffith’s works—and the modern artist showed us her own work inspired by Griffith’s expressive and accurate crustaceans.
We then dug deep into Pennant’s mineral and fossil specimens with Tom Cotterell (former Curator of Mineralogy at Amgueddfa Cymru), Dr Paul Evans (Pennant’s Biographer), and Zoe Hughes (Curator of Fossils, NHM), before taking to the skies with Pennant’s bird collection alongside Dr Edwin Rose (University of Leeds) and Hein Van Grouw (Senior Curator, Bird Group). We learned about parrots of uncertain origin, fossil catalogues harking back to Noah’s Flood, and stuffed Birds of Paradise whose missing feet had to be replaced by those of starlings. The morning was rounded off by Professor Jim Secord (University of Cambridge, and part of the Curious Travellers Steering Committee), who reflected on the session, the nature of a ‘historical collection’ in natural history, and the wealth of research opportunities presented by Pennant’s material in the Museum.
After a quick lunch we returned to our seats for further discussion on the intersection between natural history science, cultural history, and the digital humanities. Curious Travellers’ own Lisa Cardy (NHM) and Luca Guariento (Glasgow) detailed how they’ve made use of crowdsourcing software and a small army of volunteers to help link unique images and paintings from Pennant’s private collection to the new online editions of Pennant’s tours. Miranda Lewis (Oxford) then reflected on her years of work with the Early Modern Letters Online database, suggesting strategies for maintaining and enriching online resources in the hope that they remain useful and responsive to users for as long as possible. The last two papers, by John Schaefer (Cambridge) and Mark Carine (NHM) detailed how digital humanities techniques have played a part in their recent projects, with automated transcription and LLMs used to support research into Indigenous and Colonial plant-naming interactions in the South Seas, and digital methods linking and rethinking collections from centuries past, like those of Hans Sloane and John Ray in the Natural History Museum.
As there was no chance we could hold our conference at the Natural History Museum without exploring the collections themselves in person, our audience now split into groups to visit two ‘show and tell’ temporary exhibitions in the main building. The first of these was a re-display of Curious Minds: Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White, which the project first created for display at the Gilbert White House and Gardens earlier this year. The exhibition was re-created in the Museum’s Angela Marmont Centre for UK Nature, which is an accessible space for anyone interested in learning more about British Natural History—where better to discuss Pennant and his work?! We were delighted to have so many of the contributors to both the exhibition and accompanying book present from across the team, including our designer Martin Crampin, and again the exhibition was supported by the Andrew Taylor Natural History Collections, which provided the original exhibition with surrogate specimens as stand-ins for Pennant’s material. However, excitingly in this case, four of our curators from across the Museum’s science department had brought along a selection of Pennant specimens for our visitors, including fossils, minerals, crustaceans, and shells. These were poured over with wonder by all of our attendees! Meanwhile, visitors also had the opportunity to head up to the Library Special Collections Reading Room, where many Pennant-related holdings in our library were on display—from an illustrated manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History (a text cited frequently by Pennant throughout his career), to Pennant’s own books, with rather grisly bird-wing specimens packaged between the pages.
After a short tea break over which there were a whole range of excited discussions, we returned once again to the Nature Activity Centre for ‘Future Directions of Travel’, our final session of the day. The Museum’s Research Leader in Collections and Culture, Dr Isabel Davies, started our session with an excellent overview of why this intersection of humanities and science is so important, not only for its historical value, but also for the innovation opportunities it presents us with. Jessica Bradford (Director of Collections, NHM) gave us an overview of the NHM’s ‘Unlocked’ project, a challenging scheme which will see the development of a new collections and research facility for the Museum at the Thames Valley Science Park near Reading, while Helen Hardy (Deputy Head of Digital, Data, and Informatics) explored the opportunities for research innovation through digitisation of specimens and data. The session was brought to a close by Dr Nathan Smith (Head of Plant and Earth Science, Amgueddfa Cymru) with a challenging discussion on how we position ourselves as museums, and in museum spaces, given the colonial histories that collections almost inevitably contain.
By the end of the eighteenth century Pennant’s house, Downing Hall—with its stuffed specimens crowding bookshelves filled with scientific drawings—had been turned into a kind of personal museum. But this November, we instead brought Pennant home to the Natural History Museum, where we have much reason to hope that his specimens will continue to fuel research for years to come.