By Wharfedale countryside campaigner and author Colin Speakman

JUST over 200 years ago, in September 1819, a middle-aged gentlemen, his wife and a teenage boy were to be seen alighting in the North Riding town of Northallerton off the Northern Mail stagecoach, after a three day journey from London.

The new arrival was William “Strata” Smith, one of the founders of the modern science of geology, who just four years previously in 1815 had produced the first geological map of England and Wales.

This was the first such map of any country in the world, which by identifying mineral bearing rocks and areas where canals and railways could be built, was a vital tool to enable the rapid process of the Industrial Revolution in which Britain had a pioneering role.

Yet this great map did not sell well, and in July 1819 Smith, who managed his finances badly, was flung into debtors’ prison, only released when friends paid his debts. His 18-year-old nephew and apprentice cartographer-geologist John Phillips was waiting outside the prison gates, to travel with Smith and slightly deranged wife to as far away as they could get from London – to Yorkshire. London’s loss was soon Yorkshire’s gain.

For the next four years William Smith and John Phillips travelled together throughout the North of England and Midlands working as itinerant land surveyors and cartographers, advising landowners on mining, drainage and canal projects, even visiting Swaledale and the Yorkshire coast.

But in 1822 they settled in the little market town of Kirkby Lonsdale, using the town as a base for whatever work they could find whilst completing geological maps of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Westmorland.

In whatever spare time they had, the two men began walking in the magnificent countryside we now know as the Yorkshire Dales, starting a lifelong fascination for John in the great limestone landscapes around Ingleton, Clapham and Settle, puzzling over the complex fault lines and mineral veins, talking to miners and landowners and visiting the area’s amazing cave system.

In 1824 as a result of a chance meeting with a member of the newly established society of amateur gentlemen-scientists in the city of York – the Yorkshire Philosophical Society – Smith was invited to give a series of lectures in York. By now in his early 20s, John came to assist his uncle, but soon found himself helping the society organise their large collection of fossils.

So delighted was the president of the society, Vernon Harcourt, with John’s energy and skills, within a few more months the society took the young man on as their paid secretary.

He helped organise the society’s first museum, and soon proved that far from being his uncle’s assistant, he was a gifted lecturer in his own right.

By the mid-1820s John and William were exploring the Yorkshire coast, and in 1829 John published his classic study Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire – the Yorkshire Coast, the first detailed examination of the Yorkshire coastline between Holderness and Saltburn But he also became the first keeper of the great new Yorkshire Museum built in the grounds of St. Mary’s Abbey alongside the River Ouse, just outside the city walls, and opened in 1830.

This was a period when the young York Philosophical Society was a focal point of intellectual life for the whole of the North of England.

In 1831 the YPS called a meeting of scientists which led to the setting up of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with John Phillips as its first secretary. He not only lectured to learned societies, but also without fee to working class audiences in Mechanics Institutes in places such as York, Manchester and Leeds.

He was also hugely supportive in setting up naturalist and scientific scientists in various cities, including the prestigious Yorkshire Geological Society in Wakefield.

But there was more to follow. In 1836 Phillips published Illustrations of the Geology of Yorkshire Part Tw the Mountains Limestone. This book remains a masterpiece of early geological science, and for almost 90 years was the standard textbook on the limestones of the Yorkshire Dales. Phillips was the first to explain the complexities of the Craven Fault and first to name what are still referred to as the Yoredale Series of limestone, named after the high scars of Wensleydale.

By now enjoying a national reputation not just as a geologist but a scientific polymath, publishing endless brilliant scientific papers in geology, palaeontology (study of fossils), mineralogy, meteorology, and even astronomy, he continued to be based in York whist accepting professorships in London and Dublin.

A treatise on West country fossils established his great classification of early life – Palaeozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic - and he was among the first to correctly identify the catastrophic events between geological eras which almost wiped out life on earth on several occasions.

In 1853 he was to publish what is still perhaps one of the finest books ever written about the Yorkshire landscape – The Rivers, Mountains and Sea Coast of Yorkshire, which looks at the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, Moors, Coast and Wolds with the eye of both a leading scientist but also of an artist, illustrating the books with some wonderful line drawings.

He followed this in 1854 with what is probably the world’s first ever railway guide book – Excursions from the North Eastern Railway, suggesting places to visit throughout Yorkshire by train, including walks from railway stations into picturesque part of the Yorkshire Dales such Otley Chevin, Ilkley, Bolton Abbey, Harrogate, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountains Abbey, Wensleydale, Richmond and Swaledale.

In 1854 following the death in a railway accident of Henry Strickland, Reader in geology at Oxford University, John Phillips was head-hunted by the university where in 1860 on the death of Professor Buckland he was appointed to one of the most prestigious academic posts in the country, Professor of Geology at Oxford.

This was a remarkable achievement for someone who had never received any formal higher education and indeed was not even a university graduate when appointed Reader.

He continued to write and lecture in many scientific fields, and is rightly regarded as one of the intellectual giants of his era, recently described by leading historian of science Professor Martin Rudwick as “one of the world’s greatest palaeontologists”.

On his last visit to the Dales, in 1873, Phillips came up to examine the latest research at Victoria Cave in Settle undertaken by his students Boyd Dawkins and Tiddeman, which as Settle archaeologist Tom Lord has pointed out, provided crucial evidence of the complex nature of inter-glacial periods of climate change in the Yorkshire Dales, science of crucial importance and interest to our own times.

Only a few months later, in April 1874 a tragic fall in an Oxford college led to John Phillips’s sudden death. As he wished, he was buried in York, in a simple grave in the city cemetery next to his beloved sister Anne, but the whole city turned out to mourn him with the great bell of the Minster being tolled

Yet it was his love of the Yorkshire landscape that more than anything else defines the continuing legacy of John Phillips, both his beloved Yorkshire Dales and the Coast of the North York Moors.

He writes with a passion and yet scientific precision that few writers about Yorkshire have ever equalled. As a great walker-writer he knew the Dales in particular, intimately – on foot, describing areas such as Easedale below Gregareth or the valley above Kisdon in Swaledale in ways that only the keenest fell walkers ever can.

This understanding and knowledge influenced many other later writers and interpreters of the Dales. Even people who have never heard the name John Phillips have been influenced by his ideas.

This included a recognition of the special qualities of the landscape and natural history of the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors that we now know to have national, and even international importance. This awareness led in the 1950s to their designation as among the UK’s first National Parks.

It can therefore be truly said that John Phillips was one of the founding fathers of the National Park movement, and of the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors National Parks in particular.

John Phillips – Yorkshire’s Traveller through Time by Colin Speakman (ISBN 978-0-9955609-8-7) is published by Gritstone Publishing Co-operative (www.gritstonecoop.co.uk) and can be ordered online priced £15 (PayPal or credit card) post free.