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13th July 2019

It was a good day for exploring the environmental history of the Broads.  Blue skies, lovely summer countryside and three old churches greeted fifteen people bent on finding out more about the origins of the landscape.  Venturing beyond the familiar, they encountered the stony and sandy elements making up the area’s geological foundations and were introduced to a two million-year old story of landscape change.

Three lectures at Cantley Village Hall set the scene.  The first, from Tim Holt-Wilson, gave a depth perspective to the Broads landscape by focusing on the story of the Pleistocene epoch which ended about 10,000 years ago.  The land is a physical archive of information about the remote past, he said, which we can investigate through ‘windows’ such as quarries, boreholes, landforms and soils. The area has a complex geology, thanks to the activities of now-vanished rivers, at least two ice sheets and the fluctuating North Sea margin over the past two million years.  Evidence for this can be found in the stony rubble picked from local fields and used in Mediaeval church walls.

The second lecture, by Dr Andrea Kelly, explored the area’s environmental history over the last 10,000 years (known as the Holocene epoch).  Andrea explained what can be learned by taking core samples from the peat and alluvial sediments which blanket valley floors in the Broads, and how this knowledge helps conserve the area’s special wildlife.

Our first field trip took us Strumpshaw in a fleet of shared cars. We visited a disused quarry in a wood where Adrian Read and Tim Holt-Wilson explained evidence for the passing of a Pleistocene ice sheet.

Sandy glacial outwash sediments, most likely dating from the Anglian glaciation about 440,000 years ago, overlain and distorted by coarse boulder gravel. The orientation of the cobbles suggests that water flow came from the north-west.

Adrian Read explaining some of the site’s geological features.

The next stop was the RSPB nature reserve at Strumpshaw Fen, where Adrian explained the geology in a small sand pit.  Yellow sands and silts belonging to the Norwich Crag formation were most likely deposited about 2 million years ago in a tidal environment on the western edge of the North Sea.

Dipping beds of sand overlain by horizontally bedded silts are likely to represent a dynamic tidal environment, as explained by Adrian Read.

We also visited the floodplain meadows of the Yare valley in the company of Andrea Kelly  who led a peat coring demonstration.  Some hardy souls rolled up their sleeves and helped pull up oozing, black core samples from a depth of 8 metres. We recovered a succession of mossy and woody peat types and silty layers – all evidence for a succession of environments in the valley stretching back five or six thousand years, or more.

Bringing up the first core sample, directed by Andrea.

The morning’s activities had worked up a healthy appetite, which was dealt with by packed lunches back at Cantley.

The first excursion of the afternoon was to the nearby church at Wickhampton.  Famous for its Mediaeval wall paintings, our visit focused instead on the great variety of stony rubble types built into the wall.  Tim explained that these included exotic boulders, some brought by the Pleistocene ice sheets or now-vanished rivers, while others most likely brought from overseas as ship’s ballast.  The next visit was to Halvergate church, where the tower was packed with geological interest. Hard, silvery-grey rocks known as silcrete are though to have been excavated by the Romans in West Norfolk and used for their fort at Brancaster. When this was demolished in the Middle Ages some of the rubble was brought by boat to Broadland.

WICKHAMPTON. Top: basalt and granite, both likely to be examples of ship’s ballast, perhaps from Scotland. Bottom: a fragment of Mediaeval lava quern imported from Germany; a lump of chalk ‘clunch’.

HALVERGATE. Top: a boulder of ‘silver carr’ silcrete of Roman origin; a block of red sandstone, perhaps from Scotland. Bottom: A cobble of red quartzite, most likely brought by an early Pleistocene river; a brick made from locally-sourced alluvial clay.

The event finished back at Cantley, in time for tea at 4.30.

At Candlemas-tide

Ye gnarled one remembers:

Rooted in soil grit fungal crittermush,

Coaxing Aconitum and Galanthus

Toxins in the bulb

Out of Winter – rush bravely

Shining faces white and yellow

Into pale sky;

Remembering

How ponds will wax and wane

And web-foots spin

Their downy generations

Built to rise and drip

Wings upward into heaven

Always.

Horns above me

Tail ahin me

Hooves beneath me

Tripe within me

Hail to the Hornèd

Fáilte to the Fleet of Foot

May fur fly

Voice bell loud and strong

Trapped in the rut

Oh dear

At the ultimate point

Where extinguishing flips

A cold switch, chilling dip

And the lights go out

One by one – one by one:

Each is a picture, each an image

Of people, person, place;

The furnishing awareness

Dusted with half-remembering,

Dissolves into people, person, place:

The milliseconds of the only movie I ever made

But never could publish

Subsists for me alone: mon oeuvre

Unique et solitaire: ma vie.

The loves I never lived.

The glasses left undrunk.

The mountains never climbed.

A cold draught of regret

Plies me double,

Twists me back upon myself

Till all I can see is my other half.

Then it comes:

No Time – no Space.

No Space – No Time.

The still point of No Further.

The chill point, welcome portal

Of absolute Oubli.

That’s me.

That was.

That.

Was.

Thank you – firstly – for doing me the honour of asking me to be your President for 2023. It is a particular honour as my background is in geology and geological conservation, and the Society has a strong biological emphasis. However, it has never turned its back on geological enquiry. Many years ago it published ‘The Geology of Norfolk’ by Larwood & Funnell in the Transactions (1961), whose papers remain valuable reading today, over a half century later. Since then, there have been a few articles on Earth heritage subjects, for example by Tony Stuart in 1992, but most importantly many members have always had an abiding interest in geology and its linkage with wildlife and habitat. Here in particular I am remembering Gillian Beckett, Peter Lambley, Robin Stevenson. But while the Society records and researches today’s wildlife and habitat, palaeontologists and other Earth Heritage specialists record and research those of the past.

This evening I would like to speak to you about geoconservation in Norfolk. Nick Acheson, your President for 2022, issued a passionate call to arms in defence of Norfolk’s biodiversity (A Time to Storm’; TN&NNS 55, 2022). I may not be able to speak as eloquently as him in defence of Norfolk’s geodiversity, but I can introduce it and enquire into how we value it; I can explain the work of the Norfolk Geodiversity Partnership, which is likely to be unfamiliar to most of you; I can celebrate aspects of the county’s Earth heritage and explain the threats to it; finally, I can sketch out some areas for future activity.

Geodiversity

We are members of a naturalists’ society. Nature comprises all kinds of natural phenomena: the atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere. It is not restricted to Planet Earth, as nature is present on the Moon and Mars – and everywhere else in the Universe where the laws of physics, chemistry and information apply and which Science can investigate. Over the past 40 years or more, scientific discourse has expanded to include an understanding that (as Crist and Rinker put it, 2010) “early in life’s history living and non-living matter became entangled as a single entity within which organisms themselves may have been shaping conditions to their adaptive advantage. Many concepts have been used to describe this single entity: Gaia, biosphere, geophysiology, and Earth system”.  Jim Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis envisages the geological and organismal domains as forming a co-evolving unity over deep time. However, despite this scientifically-valid, whole-Earth system premise, we categorise the modalities of nature into spheres and disciplines, among them geology, botany, entomology, archaeology and so forth. Perhaps it is just easier to think that way – although ecology might disagree.

Anyway, from a practical point of view, geoconservation finds itself today separated from bioconservation and cultural heritage conservation. Judging by the greater resources and legal protections devoted to conserving wildlife and archaeology, it is thought to be a less significant part of our heritage. Geodiversity – defined as comprising geology, geomorphology, soils and waters – has been called by Murray Gray (2022) as “the oft-forgotten half of nature”. For me, it is difficult to understand how this situation has come about – this forgetting of the material Earth within conservation – unless it is due to our tendency to think dualistically: Nature versus Culture; Living versus Non-living; Biodiversity versus Geodiversity.  In fact, we know that bio, geo and human realms are interlinked systemically in the world. This is our ontological given.

Geodiversity has been described as ‘‘nature’s stage’’; the ‘’bedrock of our environment’’; ‘‘the foundation of biodiversity, where the abiotic conditions set the stage for living nature’’. The pioneering work of Charles Darwin was founded on his understanding of speciation as it unfolded over deep time, as evidenced by fossils, and the pioneering Palaeolithic archaeological work of Joseph Prestwich and John Evans in the mid-19th century depended on refined stratigraphic investigation.  Charles Lyell synthesised geology and geomorphology into a rational understanding of how physical landscapes develop, past and present. The enthusiasm with which the Victorians greeted the exhilarating expansion of mental horizons brought about by geology as well as the theory of evolution helped found early museums such as Wisbech and Ipswich, and later Norwich and the Sedgwick in Cambridge. Today, museums are hard-pressed to find resources to curate biological, let alone, geological, collections. Paradoxically, thanks to programmes such as BBC ‘Planet Earth’, people are aware of wildlife as never before, coupled with an awareness of habitat diversity, the fragility of ecosystems and the existential dangers posed by Climate Change. We just need to find a way to convince politicians and accountants that meaning does not just inhere in financial exchange value – that naturally functioning ecosystems are more than just ‘natural capital’ resources providing benefits for humans, and that preserving information about heritage is a core value for our society.

Valuing geodiversity

So how shall we value geodiversity, that overlooked and abiotic aspect of nature? It lacks the appeal of living things, which resonate with our innate biophilia, the ‘‘innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms’’, as Edmund Wilson put it. Yes, we admire mountains and thrill at volcanoes and rivers in spate; we are spell-bound by the ocean, we find beauty in crystals and love hunting for fossils. These phenomena engage our attention, but this attention is only awkwardly translated into ethical and moral consideration. Quartz crystals do not feel pain and fossils do not bleed; the landscape does not wince as mine shafts and cuttings are made, or rivers are turned into canals. Geoconservation is a minority interest – somewhere on the outer circumference of the wheel of human concerns. Perhaps a new, unitary Ethics-for-the Earth is needed before geoconservation, bioconservation and cultural conservation can receive balanced attention. What Jeffrey Cohen calls our ‘geophilia’ will no doubt have a part to play in this.

Let us agree that heritage is the sum total of everything handed down from the past to the present.  We have a philosophical Ground Zero to work from. So, which elements of our abiotic heritage shall we select as worthy of our conserving attention? It depends on our systems of value, of course. In his seminal book ‘Geodiversity’ (2004), Murray Gray established five values for conserving geodiversity: intrinsic and cultural; aesthetic; economic; functional; research and education. Gray says that “Intrinsic value refers to the ethical belief that some things (in this case the geodiversity of nature) are of value simply for what they are rather than what they can be used for by humans”. That is to say, physical nature may be considered to have a value in itself, irrespective of its utilitarian value. This viewpoint has the potential to open up ethical debate beyond anthropocentric and biocentric assumptions.

More recently, the Ecosystem Services Approach has been fostered by governments wishing to factor the utilitarian value (or ‘natural capital’) of the non-human world into society’s balance sheets. The biotic bias of this conceptualisation has been resolutely criticised by Gray, who points to the multiple Geosystem Services provided by abiotic nature, and proposes a more balanced approach to natural resource management which includes both biotic and abiotic factors. The Ecosystem Services Approach has also been criticised from a bioconservation point of view, as it does not address the intrinsic value of biodiversity. The Approach is “poorly equipped for ensuring that biodiversity – both for its own sake and for its role in underpinning human well-being – is not overlooked or undervalued”(Wildlife & Countryside Link, 2015).) It is also implicitly anthropocentric, being formulated by DEFRA (2013) as ‘What nature can do for you’.

Official geoconservation in the UK dates back to the 1940s, with the publication of a report called ‘National Geological Reserves in Great Britain’. It said that “Although geological features have not the vulnerability of plants and animals, they may, perhaps only from ignorance, be damaged or obscured, unless they receive proper care”. Statutory geoconservation came into being with the establishment of the Nature Conservancy Council in 1949, charged with identifying and protecting Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs), both geological and biological. The rationale for designating these sites was set out in the Geological Conservation Review (GCR), and a series of reports on all SSSIs was published. There are 162 SSSIs in Norfolk of which 39 (i.e. 24%) are primarily designated for their geology, while at least 23 others have significant geological factors in their designations.  

Geoconservation shifted up a gear in the first decade of this century.  An outreach publication by Stace & Larwood (2006) called ‘Natural Foundations: geodiversity for people, places and nature’ expounded the foundational role of geodiversity in our landscape, economy and spiritual life.  The practical business of geoconservation was summarised in the handbook called ‘Geological Conservation: a guide to good practice’.  At the same time, the ‘Government’s Planning Policy Statement 9: Biodiversity and Geological Conservation’ of 2005 explicitly included measures to protect geodiversity within a hierarchy of designated sites (including Local Sites as well as SSSIs) and also to protect “geological interests within the wider environment”.  It stated that “The aim of planning decisions should be to prevent harm to biodiversity and geological conservation interests”. This policy provided a platform for geoconservation groups, supported by small grants from English Nature, to engage with the planning process – a source of seed funding which kick-started much of my working life over the past two decades. A framework for action was supplied by Local Geodiversity Action Plans (LGAPs) partly modelled on the Biodiversity Action Plan format initiated in 1994. At last, Earth heritage conservation values were becoming distilled into government policy, and were beginning to filter down into wider society. This process was assisted by ‘Earth Heritage Magazine’, a free, biannual publication. In 2012, national geoconservation policy was restated in the National Planning Policy Framework but unfortunately it removed reference to ‘interests within the wider environment’ which had provided some support for geoconservation outside designated sites.

A geodiversity partnership for Norfolk

The Norfolk Geodiversity Partnership – the NGP – was founded in 2007, growing out of the Norfolk RIGS Group, the geoconservation wing of the Geological Society of Norfolk. The NGP is a voluntary association or umbrella group of organisations and individuals committed to conserving and enhancing Earth heritage. It works within the framework of the Norfolk Geodiversity Action Plan, which has five headings: 

The NGP has been doing significant work over the past 17 years, despite having no regular source of income, for example:

• Visiting and recording hundreds of sites across the county, including maintaining a Geodiversity Audit database which summarises everything known about our sites.
• Creating a map layer on the County Council’s GIS system detailing all notable sites, and making this information available to Local Authority planners.
• Writing advisory documents for planners, including developing and testing an environmental impact Sensitivity Assessment Methodology.
• Writing reports about geo features, for example in the Norfolk Coast AONB and the Broads National Park, at Bacton cliffs and on the chalk rivers of North Norfolk.
• Publishing a geoconservation handbook ‘Norfolk’s Earth Heritage’ in 2010 (available for download on the NBIS website).
• Monitoring the condition of geological SSSIs for Natural England.
• Running our NGP website, including links to research resources.
• Creating Earth heritage trails for Mousehold Heath and the Brecks area, including booklets, leaflets, web pages and even a smartphone app.
• Running day schools with field trips in the Brecks and Broads, including ones on the geology in churches.
• Recording the excavation of ‘ghost pingos’ in the Breckland in partnership with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust and Carl Sayer’s research team at UCL and the Norfolk Ponds Project.
• Advising farmers and land managers about the Earth heritage dimension of landscape recovery projects.

So, the NGP’s workload is an eclectic one, but we consider that this breadth of engagement is a positive quality and reflects the scale of the task in hand, and the systemic roots of our Earth heritage. Financial support from Natural England was withdrawn in 2010 under the Government’s ‘austerity’ agenda, which has meant that NGP funding has since been dependent on sporadic grants and project funding streams. Regular support by the Geological Society of Norfolk has enabled the NGP to maintain a bank account. As a measure of the challenges we face, to date we have only managed to designate eight County Geodiversity Sites, while having identified 352 candidates worthy of designation.  We consider that these figures demonstrate the lack of resources (money and personnel) available for geoconservation in the county. Conserving ‘Norfolk‘s Wonderful 350’ is clearly a long-term project!

So we take heart from other people’s activity in Norfolk which is helping to conserve and enhance geodiversity and public awareness, either directly or indirectly. For example:

• Biodiversity interpretation by the Norfolk Wildlife Trust which includes pingo ponds at Sweet Briar Marshes;
• River restoration and rewilding work by the Norfolk Rivers Trust;
• Habitat conservation work funded by the Norfolk Biodiversity Partnership;
• Geological collections and themed displays maintained by the Norfolk Museums Service;
• the Norfolk Historic Environment Records database keeping records of Palaeolithic sites and finds;
• The Norfolk Wildlife Trust conserving geo features in its reserves as part of bioconservation, for example Strumpshaw sand pit;
• Farmers conserving landforms and old quarries as part of Environmental Stewardship schemes, and protecting soils and groundwater through the Catchment Sensitive Farming initiative;
• Geologically-themed books, lectures, field trips and evening classes, for example Matt Williams on ‘Subterranean Norwich’ and Tom Williamson on the Broads;
• The Deep History Coast tourism initiative, with its outdoor interpretive panels;
• Educational work about coastal geology and erosion, as happens at Aylmerton Field Study Centre;
• Quarry companies including geoconservation objectives in their site after-use planning;
• The Norfolk Fossil Finds Facebook group sharing and learning online about their discoveries.

What is worth conserving and communicating?

 The Geodiversity Audit has listed about 400 notable sites and features in the county, including the SSSIs and some sites of purely geohistorical interest. We rely on a document called ‘Priorities for Geoconservation in Norfolk’ to guide our judgment. It is difficult to say which of features are the most outstanding, but a list (in no particular order) must include:

• Happisburgh – Lower Palaeolithic hominin footprints, handaxes and other flint tools found in sediments of the Cromer Forest-bed Formation, representing the earliest and northernmost evidence for human expansion into Eurasia.
• Sidestrand and Trimingham – displaying the youngest Cretaceous Chalk strata in Britain, of Maastrichtian age.
• The West Runton Elephant – the largest, most complete skeleton of the Steppe Mammoth ever found.
• The Lynford Neanderthal site – a rare example of an open-air Middle Palaeolithic site, comprising river channel deposits with Mousterian flint tools and the remains of eleven Woolly Mammoths.
• The shore at Sheringham and West Runton – the only well-developed chalk reef found between North Yorkshire and Kent.
• The North Norfolk coast – being an outstanding assemblage of dynamic coastal landforms, including the shingle spit at Blakeney Point, the offshore barrier island at Scolt Head and the dunes at Holkham and Wells-Next-The-Sea.
• The Broads – the UK’s largest nationally-protected wetland area.
• The Happisburgh Formation – geological evidence for the earliest lowland glaciation in the UK.
• Shropham Pit – the most prolific findspot in the UK for vertebrate and other fossils of the Ipswichian (last) interglacial.
• West Runton cliffs – the most prolific findspot for vertebrates of the Cromerian interglacial.
• Hunstanton Cliffs – those famous white, red and brown cliffs of early Cretaceous age, voted nationally the People’s Choice in the ‘100 Great Geosites’ competition.
• Lowland periglacial landforms – the best examples in the UK of patterned ground (‘Breckland Stripes’) and relict ground ice depressions (such as pingos).
• Diss Mere – a natural lake with sediments representing the most complete Holocene palaeo-environmental sequence in England.
• Breckland meres – a class of natural lakes developed in Chalk solution hollows.
• For geoscience, stratigraphic stages – Norfolk has contributed many Stage names to the Pliocene/Pleistocene chronostratigraphy of the UK: the Ludhamian, Thurnian, Antian, Bramertonian, Pastonian, Beestonian and Cromerian.

Parts of the county are particularly geodiverse. This diversity can be appreciated at a range of scales. At a landscape scale, top of the list for georichness is surely West Norfolk with its outcrops of Jurassic and Cretaceous bedrock, its complexes of Pleistocene and Holocene superficial deposits and its suite of landforms representing at least two glaciations. At a local level, the slumping cliffs at Overstrand are highly geodiverse, being a complex of chalk and glacigenic clays, silts, sands and gravels subject to wet flushes and seepages in a chaotic slope topography generated by slumping. This geodiversity is reflected in the great biodiversity of plant and associated insect life. Linkages between bio and geo are also well represented in the classic periglacial patterned ground and vegetation stripes of Breckland, where metre-scale variations in subsoil chemistry are reflected in corresponding heathland plant communities. Georichness is also present at small scale. At Shropham in 1994, the interglacial lake deposits were so well preserved that one could find sub-fossil beetle elytra, snail shells, pine cones, gnawed hazelnut shells and seed capsules of water chestnut (Trapa natans) alongside bones and teeth of beaver (Castor fiber), bison (B. priscus), elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) and hippopotamus (H.amphibius). By contrast, a metre above that were cold-phase river gravels virtually devoid of fossils. Geodiverse deposits such as these have great interpretive potential as well as scientific importance if they can be identified and then adequately recorded – and hopefully preserved and made ongoingly accessible.

Opportunities and threats

So, Norfolk’s geodiversity is evidently worth conserving and enhancing for future generations. To do this we need to be able to identify threats to it. All development will impact in one way or another on geology, landscape, landforms, soil and water. On the positive side, it may create access to information for research and education by opening up geological exposures, for example at the Norwich Northern Bypass. On the negative side, it may:

• Destroy the integrity of finite, past landforms which took millennia to develop – examples might include a river terrace or a periglacial pingo depression.
• It may impede active, natural processes which create and maintain present day landforms – an example would be canalising a river.
• It may destroy finite geological deposits and the palaeo-environmental information they contain, including archaeological evidence of early human life – an example would be the backfilling of Keswick gravel pit.
• It may contaminate and deplete soils and water resources – examples might be land-raising using imported soil or over-abstraction of groundwater which starves springs.

We have developed a Sensitivity Assessment Methodology for evaluating threats. The Earth Science Conservation Classification system provides the best framework for addressing threats to scientific value, while the Ecosystem Services Approach  is a useful framework for threats to educational, historical, cultural and aesthetic value. By drawing on ‘Priorities for Geoconservation in Norfolk’ we can evaluate sensitivity in terms of impact on conservation (or intrinsic) and utilitarian (or functional) values. Assets might be an old quarry, a river terrace landform or a Holocene peat deposit. Impact is quantified, where possible; for example impact of peat loss on atmospheric carbon can readily be calculated. Our Methodology has been published on the NGP website and on two online portals (Academia.edu and ResearchGate) and it was summarised as a poster at the ‘Geoconservation for science and society’ conference of the Geologist’s Association at Worcester, 2011. It was recently used by a consultancy company in their work at Horning Marina.

Where do we go from here?

Evidently, we need to find resources to designate more County Geo Sites. Meanwhile, we find that many land owners and managers are interested in knowing about the geological as well as wildlife and archaeological features on their land. Earth heritage is often ‘terra incognita’ for them, although they have a practical, daily knowledge of soils, water and topography. They may know about County Wildlife Sites and SSSIs on their land, but not candidate County Geo Sites or general Earth heritage features. National agri-environment schemes offer limited opportunities to attract funding to enhance Earth heritage. Geoconservation objectives are not included in the Sustainable Farming Initiative, and are only explicitly mentioned in Countryside Stewardship as option FM1 (Management of Geodiversity Features) which only pertains to geological SSSIs. Thus, enhancement of Earth heritage can only be carried out when tagged onto CS options designed to conserve wildlife and ecology or cultural heritage. As an example, the NGP is currently advising a Fen-edge farmer about conserving 10,000 year-old, relict periglacial ponds with likely prehistoric archaeological interest, although these are not mapped as heritage assets either by Natural England or Historic England. We have recently heard on the grapevine that Natural England is considering designating ‘Ice Age Ponds’ as Priority Habitat. This would spur work to identify relict periglacial ground-ice depressions in the county and beyond. The NGP has been working with the Norfolk Wildlife Trust since 2020 to map likely ponds by firming up identification criteria and building on the results of an initial survey by Andrina Walmsley completed in 2008.

This work links nicely with the NWT’s Ghost Pingos Project in the Breckland, in collaboration, since 2019, with Carl Sayer at UCL and with other researchers.  At Watering Farm and other sites in the Breckland, NGP members have been recording and sampling the sediments and associated archaeology of relict GIDs being excavated as part of habitat enhancement work. Using a grant from Brighton University, we hope to be able to get samples dated and analysed for fossil pollen and plants macros, and so gain a better understanding of the evolution of these ponds and their associated flora and faunal history, including the story of local human impacts. Preliminary results indicate some plant rarities emerging from the mud. This work can feed into advisory booklets about how to resurrect Ice Age Ponds and Ghost Ponds, and so foster wetland biodiversity.

This work is happening in the conceptual space where geodiversity, biodiversity and archaeological heritage overlap – where the present-day, living skin of our planet interacts with the archive of past environments and human occupation stratified in the geological record. We live and are at home in this space. Humans may one day visit other planets at great expense, but factors of atmospheric composition, temperature, gravity and cosmic fluxes will combine to make for exceedingly difficult adventures. Practically, the Earth is our only home. When I talk about this dimension of our shared lifeworld with its roots in the vasty stretch of time, people are invariably interested and engaged. It has taken me over a half a century to reach my present (inadequate) level of knowledge and awareness of East Anglia’s Earth heritage. As with any other specialism, there is an infinite amount we can discover and learn about the story of the evolving Earth, and the way it represents itself in our particular ‘patch’. We justify this by sharing what we have discovered with others and hopefully expanding their geological awareness. In my view, it is an important, radical task – with a reminder here that the word ‘radical’ comes from the Latin word ‘radix’, root. For instance, I don’t think it is particularly radical to point out that valleys have floodplains, but it is radical and ‘rooty’ to direct people’s attention to how they formed over deep time, and what evidence of past environments may be stratified within them, and to show them the evidence. We may conduct people away from the partly-remembered content of a physical geography lesson and into a meaningfully-mediated encounter with the planet as it is in the raw, and into the deep-time perspective which allows us to make sense of it as an evolving entity – as a tremendous, evolving wonder. In doing so, we may happen to lead them into making a more intimate and better-informed relationship with the Earth. To paraphrase Charles Darwin (1859), “For, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless geodiversity features most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”. The same goes for biodiversity! When I see a photo of the harvestman Dicranopalpus ramosus I see a craggy face looking back at me which is over 300 million years old. When I see Magnolia grandiflora I see a graceful tree which once sheltered dinosaurs. When I see the flowers of Sheep’s-bit Jasione montana I see the stunning blue colour which once reflected in the eyes of a woolly rhinoceros or a tundra vole. We owe such insights to rocks and fossils, those ancient and valuable gifts of our shared Earth heritage.

© TD Holt-Wilson, 2024

Sweet diatoms

You make me smile

Algal atoms

Too small to see

But for my eye

Peering microscopically

Your fiddly frames

Of filigree silica

Seem big to me

“This lost country composers do not actually remember, but each of them remains all his life somehow attuned to it; he is wild with joy when he is singing the airs of his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame, but then, in seeking fame, turns his back upon it, and it is only when he despises it that he finds it when he utters, whatever the subject with which he is dealing, that peculiar strain the monotony of which—for whatever its subject it remains identical in itself—proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. But is it not the fact then that from those elements, all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even by friend to friend, by master to disciple, by lover to mistress, that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with his fellows only by limiting himself to external points common to us all and of no interest, art, the art of a Vinteuil like that of an Elstir, makes the man himself apparent, rendering externally visible in the colours of the spectrum that intimate composition of those worlds which we call individual persons and which, without the aid of art, we should never know? A pair of wings, a different mode of breathing, which would enable us to traverse infinite space, would in no way help us, for, if we visited Mars or Venus keeping the same senses, they would clothe in the same aspect as the things of the earth everything that we should be capable of seeing. The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star”.

[Extract from ‘The Prisoner’ by Marcel Proust]

Midsummer midnight,
Warm, thick, still,
With blizzard of insects lamping.
Hemlock stinks,
Wants to kills Socrates,
Bides its time:
Eight foot-high
Pitiless stunner.

.

The Big Debate
Tom Paine Festival

Diss, Norfolk, England. Feb 6th 2009.

Was Thomas Paine a great man – or an agent of destruction?

Thomas Paine is a controversial figure for left and right of the political spectrum. In the USA, President Obama quoted him in his inauguration speech.

Was Paine a great man or – as the Daily Telegraph has described him -‘an agent of destruction’?

Tim Holt-Wilson speaks for Paine, with Dr. Adrian Bailey speaks against.

The motion for

I would like to begin with a poetic reading. In 2004 I had the privilege of cataloguing the Thomas Paine collection at Thetford Library, and found a poem from 1794 called ‘The Illustrious Friends ‘ by Thomas Ashby of Bungay. It was a satirical piece in the style of Milton, comparing Thomas Paine to Satan.

Thrice hail, great legislator Paine!

Satan in thee rebels again.

Well hast thou braved all human laws,

all laws divine, in Satan’s cause!

says the Devil.

The character of Paine replies:

Dread sire! I’m mighty glad to find

I’ve done this mission to your mind!

…

Much I enforced your grand design,

the Democratic scheme divine!

I taught the equalising plan,

and thus proclaimed the Rights of Man.

And so it goes on

I was already well aware that Thomas Paine was a figure of controversy in his own time, but as I leafed through this book I came across the list of contemporary subscribers. There among them I found the names of Mr & Mrs Thomas Holt of Redgrave, 18th century relations of mine. The figure of Thomas Paine had been a part of their lives, and they disliked him and all that he represented.

A few weeks ago I became aware that Thomas Paine was still a figure of controversy, even 200 years after his death.  The Diss Express published a letter from Pete Gillings saying that he found nothing to celebrate in the life of Thomas Paine. The man was a traitor, a dishonest man, a failure. What on earth was there to celebrate in Thomas Paine?

In the next 18 minutes or so I shall endeavour to convince you all that Thomas Paine is very worthy of celebration, and that he made a real contribution to what has been called the Atlantic revolution of the late 18th century. He has been dead for 200 years, but like William Cobbett, who went to America to recover Paine’s bones, I shall try to bring back his reputation from obscurity and raise it up as a monument in your hearts and minds, and breathe new life into his old bones.

So much vituperation has been flung at Paine over the years: Paine the drunkard, the self-deluded idealist, the infidel atheist. In 1791 the government of William Pitt paid a man called Francis Chalmers to write a malicious biography of the man, to fine-tune the story of his life until all we hear is weakness and delusion. Which of us could stand against such an assault? However, the accomplishments of Thomas Paine the man and his quality as a human being have ridden this out, over two centuries, and I argue that he stands now as the greatest freethinker and radical that Britain has ever produced.

Who can doubt that 18th-century Britain needed reforming, even as she still needs reforming? Consider what political life was like in the 18th century. To be entitled to vote you had to be a man with a certain property qualification. If you were a woman or a weaver, a servant, soldier or pauper, or even a staymaker, you had no vote. You paid your taxes and you shut up. The town of Thetford returned two MPs and they were elected by only 30 voters. The town of Manchester had 60,000 people but no representation.

Consider what social life was like in the 18th century. Less than 10% of the people owned more than 90% of the wealth, chiefly in the form of land. In 1805 a labourer received in wages only about one eighth of the real value of his labour. For Paine the spectacle of the poor living alongside the wealthy was obscene, like seeing corpses chained to the living he said. The influence of religion was everywhere, and dissenters such as Quakers and Baptists could not hold public office. The law was savage in its execution, particularly to the poor.

But this was also the time of the Enlightenment. Thoughtful people were busy extending the boundaries of knowledge and questioning all received wisdom. The philosopher Kant summed up enlightenment as “Man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another…. “Have courage to use your own understanding!” – that is the motto of enlightenment”. Thomas Paine applied the Enlightenment to the world he saw around him. He confronted the three major evils of his time: lack of political representation, poverty and religious fraudulence. He cogently argued that British society should be run for the benefit of ordinary people rather than an unelected minority of aristocrats; he thought republican government was the only way this could be achieved. He drew up carefully costed plans for a social security system that provided a guaranteed minimum income and a pension for the elderly. His pen inspired the American colonies to rise up and govern themselves. He believed that each person should be the master of his or her own immortal soul. He argued for public education, the rights of women, the end of slavery, and for the rights of animals. He argued in a straightforward language that ordinarily people could understand, and we today can appreciate and read with pleasure.

By now you may be getting some idea of the breadth of his sympathy and engagement – and the reason why his fame has been less than it deserves: he challenged all kinds of vested interests. So Thomas Paine’s reputation has led an underground life in the cultural awareness of Britain and France and America. But it surfaced triumphantly a few weeks ago in President Obama’s inaugural speech in which he compared the nation’s present troubles to those facing the American Revolution in the cold winter of 1776, and quoted directly from Paine: ‘Let it be told to the future world … that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive … that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet (it.)”. Paine enthusiasts have not been slow to point this out. Their man is in the White House.

* * * * *

I would now like to take this opportunity to give you a brief biography of Thomas Paine, to provide a background for his achievements.

We do not know much about his early life.  He was born in Thetford in 1737. He seems to have been an earnest boy with a strong moral sense, and left school at 13 to be apprenticed to a staymaker. He had a chequered career in England. Aged 20 he joined a privateer ship and made enough prize money to enable him to spend a year in London studying. He worked as a staymaker in Dover and Sandwich, where he got married but his wife died in childbirth. In 1761 he trained as an excise man. He was posted to Lincolnshire in 1764 but was dismissed for irregularities in stamping of goods. (His boss was dismissed for the same offence the following year). He then worked in Diss for a staymaker. In 1766 he made a living as an English teacher. In 1768 he was reinstated as an excise officer and given a job in Lewes. He became an active member of a local debating society and wrote political articles in newspapers. He married again, but the relationship was a disaster, and he and his wife quickly separated. In 1772 he wrote a pamphlet and negotiated with the government about the pay and conditions of his fellow excise officers but was dismissed for being a troublemaker. Thus far, the life of Thomas Paine was a chequered path to ordinariness and oblivion.

His fortunes changed in 1774. His friend Benjamin Franklin suggested he emigrate to America. He arrived there at a time of great political unrest. He was offered the job of a magazine editor and began writing popular articles on social and political matters. In 1775 he was roused to indignation by the British government’s treatment of the American colonists, and wrote a pamphlet called ‘Common Sense‘. It had enormous sales, and became the war cry of the revolutionary movement in America. It was also acclaimed in Europe, as Paine wrote ‘ the cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind’, and ‘we have it in our power to begin the world all over again’. Paine had found his metier as a writer advocating independence and liberty.

During the revolutionary war Thomas Paine served as a soldier as well as a public official. He wrote an inspiring series of 13 pamphlets between 1776 and ‘83 which he called the ‘American Crisis‘. They helped rally people, bolstered their morale and convinced them that independence was possible. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls’, began pamphlet Number 1 (this is the one Obama quoted from). 1783 saw the final defeat of British forces, and Paine wrote his last ‘American Crisis’ pamphlet, saying that ‘The times that tried men’s souls are over, and the greatest and complete revolution the world ever knew gloriously and happily accomplished’. In gratitude for his services to the revolution Congress granted him a 300-acre farm in New York State.

In 1789 first news of the French Revolution broke upon the world, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was published. There was much popular support for the revolution in England. Thomas Paine visited Paris and wrote to his friend Edmund Burke explaining how the royal powers were being removed and church property was being confiscated. Burke was horrified and set to work writing his famous ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’. It argued that the revolution was an overthrow of the natural order of society in which each element should be in its proper and harmonious place. Paine issued a rebuttal called ‘Rights of Man’ Part One.

This was a phenomenal success and sold 200,000 copies in its first year, thanks to a low cover- price and its witty, accessible style. He answered Burke’s eulogy of church and state by attacking the hereditary principle in government and society, and by explaining why the Revolution was necessary. Each generation must be free to shape its own future according to its needs, he argued. ‘Rights of Man’ Part Two was published in 1792, and set out the case for a system of representative republican government in Britain and the whole world. He showed how progressive, affordable taxation could remove poverty in Britain. He proposed pensions for the over- 50s, an education fund for poor children and a birth grant for every child. It was a book that answered the need of the times.

Reaction to ‘Rights of Man’ Part Two was swift. The Pitt government launched a slander campaign by commissioning Chalmers’ biography; effigies of Paine were burnt all over the country; a royal proclamation against seditious writings was issued; mobs were inspired to root out radicals; people such as Samuel Ashby wrote their satirical poetry; cartoonists had a field day.

Radical societies formed all over the country to debate implementation of the ‘Rights of Man’. We hear that the Norwich Revolutionary Society had 30 to 40 affiliated groups in the city and many more in the country villages. Meanwhile Paine was busy printing cheap editions of his book and attending meetings swarming with government spies. In September 1792 he left the country with an arrest warrant hot on his heels, and was convicted in his absence by a show trial. He arrived in Calais to a hero’s welcome and was offered French citizenship and became a representative in the national Convention. He became deeply embroiled in republican politics and argued for sparing the life of King Louis 16th. In 1793 he was thrown in prison as a counter-revolutionary, and narrowly escaped being guillotined. On his release from prison in 1794 he published ‘The Age of Reason’, which used scientific reason to examine the Bible and stripped away what he called its three frauds of mystery, miracle and prophecy, in favour of a natural religion based on the deist concept of a single Creator. Opinion in Britain and America was split, with passionate arguments for and against.

In 1796 he published a pamphlet called ‘Agrarian Justice’ which argued that people should be indemnified through taxation for the loss of their birthright to the land, and the proceeds should be used to fund a social security programme. That year he also published ‘Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance’ which forecasted the collapse of the British economy through debt.

Disgusted by the totalitarian transformation of the French republic by Napoleon Bonaparte, Paine returned to America in 1802. There he found a very different America from the one he had left 15 years earlier. He was vilified as an infidel and a drunkard; he was used as a political football by politicians trying to discredit the Jefferson administration; he was not allowed to vote. In constant pain from illnesses contracted in prison, he drank to excess and annoyed people with his cantankerous letter writing. He died in great pain, May 1809, from gangrenous bed sores.

* * * * *

So, was Thomas Paine a great man or an agent of destruction?

I put it to you that he was truly a great man, a significant man, a man who shaped history by the power of his eloquence and moral vision. He was not necessarily an original thinker, but drew together the ideas of the Enlightenment and gave them a radical popular relevance. He was a great communicator, and has been called the moral father of the Internet for his interest in global communication.

The Pitt government rightly feared Paine. He was a catalyst, a yeast in the ferment of ideas in late 18th century Britain which moved public opinion towards the possibility of political liberty, social equality and individual conscience. He was a vital part of that shift from radical thought to popular action which flowered in the working class movement of the 19th and 20th centuries. His ideas were literally centuries ahead of their time.

If he was an agent of destruction it was because he attacked people’s acceptance of social and political inequalities and authoritarian religious doctrine. He preached the rights of all men to equal representation and freedom of expression, based on a concept of natural rights. The notable American freethinker Richard Gimbel called him a ‘Fighter for freedom in three worlds: the Old, the New and the Next’.

“A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose” he told George Washington. Along with the Marquis de Lafayette he is the common factor in both the American and French revolutions. His writing helped to create the American and helped shape the republican direction of the French. It must have been very disappointing for him that he could not add a third revolution, in Britain, to his battle honours. 

As President Obama has recently demonstrated, Paine’s words ring out over the centuries, like those of Shakespeare or the Bible, to be quoted at times of need and stress. Franklin Roosevelt quoted ‘These are the times that try men’s souls..” after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Paine’s words will resonate wherever there is a need for a great gathering of hearts, minds and bodies in the cause of freedom and justice. ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again’ is Thomas Paine’s way of saying ‘Yes we can!’.

Ladies and gentlemen, I put it to you that Thomas Paine was a great man. I find it impossible to describe him as any less than a hero. I invite you to give him the recognition he so richly deserves.

NOTE

Dr Adrian Bailey spoke against. The motion in Paine’s favour was carried by 70 votes to 3.

If ever there were dragons
they left their passion here
in garnet schist and granite,
crazy migmatite
of marbled black and white:
hot scramblings of the pluton.

What’s left of monks is bony, hard
to see: a grassy field
where horses crop and starlings pop
and bubble natter-songs
of seed and insect, feeding
over buried walls.

Cobble-flocks and boulders
cluster; mortared stone
reliques tell crustal stories deeper
than our poor humanity.
Churches pass and minsters fall:
the pagan flint remains.