A PAIR of boots belonging to a Dent born priest and founder of modern geology have been returned to his Cambridge home after spending 191 years in Scotland.

In 1827, Charles Darwin’s geological mentor, the Rev Adam Sedgwick, Woodwardian professor of geology in the University of Cambridge, made a geological tour of Scotland. At the end of the trip Sedgwick called upon Charles Lyell at Kinnordy, his ancestral home in Forfarshire (now Angus).

The 42 year-old Sedgwick, who grew up in the Dales and was educated at Sedbergh School, was an established star of the revolutionary new science of geology. So was the 30 year-old Lyell, who wrote one of the most influential books in mid 19th century science. Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ became the scientific ‘bible’, which Darwin took with him on the voyage of the Beagle.

On departure from Kinnordy, Sedgwick left his boots behind. Now, in the bicentenary year of Sedgwick becoming Woodwardian professor (1818), the boots have been returned to Cambridge, donated by relatives of Lyell, the Gifford family, who still live at Kinnordy.

Such was Sedgwick’s prestige, that until recently the boots held pride of place on the piano in the library at Kinnordy. A relative of the Giffords remembers noticing the ‘ wee tackety’ boots with their nailed soles still sitting on the piano in the 1970s. Although the piano has now gone, the boots, carefully labelled as ‘Presented by Professor Sedgwick, Sept. 24th, 1827, Post diluvian?’ have been well looked after and are in remarkably good condition.

The ‘?Post diluvian’ end-note is a geological in-joke between Sedgwick and Lyell. It refers to the biblical flood and the creation of humankind, an increasingly contentious topic at the time with debate over the nature and relative age of diluvial deposits in relation to their fossil remains.

The boots have gone on on display in the University of Cambridge’s Sedgwick Museum as part of the bicentenary celebration of Sedgwick becoming the 7th Woodwardian professor in 1818. The Museum was built as a memorial to Adam Sedgwick and opened in 1904 by King Edward VII who had first met Sedgwick in 1847 at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, when he was just six years old.