My ’22 Top Ten – 3. Earth Club
“Pupils are happy and well cared for. They attend a range of different activities, such as girls’ football, yoga and the Earth club.”
Since starting up York’s Hidden History with the most excellent Dr Simon Rogerson (buy his books here!), I have become a bit obsessed with the ancient, natural and scientific history of Micklegate. York’s Great Street has all manner of fascinating tales to tell, and when we were asked if we might offer a Visit York Members event, I suggested a...
In June, the University of York launched the Streetlife project, turning the former Dorothy Perkins store on Coney Street into a space celebrating creatively the street’s history, heritage, and future. Via our York’s Hidden History walks (especially the York Earth Walk), I was asked if I could help people uncover the deep time stories of Coney Street, beginning during the...
In July, I went to Clayton St John Primary School in Bradford, to run a Yorkshire Fossils class. This was part of my Stratum Young project, supported by the Geoscience Communications Fund of the Yorkshire Geological Society, and it was lovely to go in and work with the children to discuss, describe and draw the fossils they can find in...
I don’t really need to re-write the post I put up in August, but one of my highlights of the summer was being palaeontological consultant and fossil roadshow host for Rosie Barrett‘s Creatures of Curiosity exhibition at Nunnington Hall. Rosie tells me that more than 20,500 people visited the exhibition. I made a video, which is rubbish, but gives you...
At some point I should probably write a proper blogpost about how marvellous the 2022 Yorkshire Fossil Festival, which I organized in Scarborough over the weekend of September 16th to 18th, was. Now is not that point. Instead, I will refer you to the image above; the fact that we won an award for excellence in geological education from the...
I’ve been looking back over the year of 2022, deciding what my favourite fossily and earthy things were. I’ve ended up with ten highlights, so I’m going to work through them backwards, chronologically. Number 10 is the discovery I made last month that Henry Moore’s school in Castleford sits on a layer of fossilized sea creatures from Ukraine. After I...
I popped into Henry Moore’s alma mater last week, to talk to the Year 9 geography students about palaeontology and Geoscience for the Future. In preparing my talk, I was curious to know what rocks were beneath the school. On consulting the British Geological Survey map, I was unsurprised to learn that the bedrock was Carboniferous. This was Castleford, a...