Mary-Ann Constantine
Around 1620 a map of Flintshire ‘Performed by’ the cartographer John Speed was published as part of The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine. In 1778, in an extraordinary section towards the end of his first volume of Tours in Wales, we get something closer to Flintshire ‘Exposed by’ Thomas Pennant. This Tour begins at his home, Downing Hall, Whitford, near Holywell, and proceeds in a meandering fashion to Chester, down the border into Shropshire, and back up through the Vale of Clwyd. At the village of Nannerch Pennant notes that the valley forms ‘a boundary of the mineral tract of our country’. He then takes ‘a kind of bird’s eye view of the whole’, splitting the area into ‘divisions’ and, with X-Ray vision, peeling back the landscape to reveal what lies beneath.
By this point in the tour the reader is very familiar with the author’s obsessive interest in minerals and their extraction (we’ve had everything from vivid accounts of ‘peacock coal’ and smelting houses to Ancient British mining techniques and Elizabethan monopolies). It is nonetheless an intriguing moment: after all, travel writers usually tell us what they can see. One of the genre’s most popular modes in the eighteenth century is the picturesque – an aesthetic appreciation of form, light and shade, of variety and balance in the arrangement of rocks, trees, rivers, ruins. Pennant is quite capable of evoking such scenes, but here, floating like a kite above Flintshire in his ‘aerial speculation’, he strips them away, laying bare a minimalist world of minerals and metals, stretching across the county and under the Dee Estuary – strata of coal, limestone, chert and shale veined with lead and silver.
What is especially pleasing about this rather visionary moment in the Tour is that we know it derives from years of hands-on research and collecting dating back to the 1750s. Pennant’s original specimen cabinets (beautifully made to a design by Lewis Morris of Anglesey) now sit in the NHM Mineralogy department with many items intact; better still, his own handwritten catalogue of this collection is preserved in NHM’s Library and Archives. The specimens themselves have been on their own journeys and have stories to tell – of where they began and what experiments they have undergone:
‘A marle of a brown color mixed with grey veins […] It falls to pieces readily in water, does not ferment with aq.fortis and burns to a reddish brown and greater hardness. A thick stratum of this marle is found near our summerhouse, about a foot beneath the surface.‘
You can just imagine him, while everyone else takes tea, digging away with a trowel. One lump or two?
Pennant’s description of what we might call a Flintshire ‘underscape’ appears about thirty-five years before the visualisation of geological Britain in the gorgeous maps published by William Smith in 1815. It’s a useful reminder of the detailed knowledge accumulated over centuries of stop-start mining ventures and agricultural practice; knowledge which increased exponentially in Pennant’s time as the industrial revolution got underway and money was poured into the extractive industries and the development of new techniques. ‘It is at this time’, as Pennant notes wryly, ‘an undetermined question, whether more wealth has been gotten out of the earth, or more lost in the search after the prizes in this subterraneous lottery.’
