But then, in a space of just a few hundred thousand years, and maybe less, the seas swished their way back, the trees and plants and animals were overrun by salt water and drowned and died, thin sands were laid down on top of all the dead vegetation, and then yet more limestone and shale and mudstone and marl formed and pressed down on the organic mat below, until all was hot and heavy enough for the heating and compression to begin—heating and compression that would turn all this thick, brown, decaying, gas-rich pulp into the hard, black rock we know today as bituminous coal.
In some places, where the world of the era three hundred million years ago was geologically stable—in Poland, say, in Westphalia, in northern England—the coal and sandstones that alternated with one another were thick and fat and relatively undistorted by any later tectonic events. But in Somerset and the rest of southwestern England and Wales, matters were very different. The layers of coal in the hills to the south of Bath have all been folded, closely, complicatedly, and very differently from the coal layers that are found in the fields of Poland or Nottinghamshire. The Somerset coals have been squashed into small, tightly wound folds and are fractured by countless faults and fissures—making them difficult to find, tricky to mine, and costly to pry from under the earth.
The crushing and twisting of the Somerset Coal Measures is evidence of part of one of the most dramatic events of more recent geological history. The rocks in this part of the world were all caught for millions of years in the gigantic vise of a cataclysmic mountain-building movement, one that occurred when the European and African tectonic plates of three hundred million years ago moved sharply and catastrophically against each other.
The grinding and squeezing and gnashing and crashing—basically, the closing of a huge sea called the Rheic Ocean that had divided Europe and North America on the one hand from Africa and South America on the other—went on for scores of millions of years, leading to the development of an entirely new supercontinent of the Permian period, called Pangea. The events, the vast rippling and crushing of the earth that so affected southwestern England, was once called the Hercynian orogeny. Now, like much in modern geology, it has a new name, the Variscan orogeny—and it has left a legacy of subterranean contortions and distortions that have greatly affected the appearance of all pre-Permian rocks of the region. It has not made too much of a difference to the scenery above—few phenomena above the surface in Somerset would prompt anyone to imagine millions of years of crushing and grinding. But what those years did to the underside of Somerset is truly awesome.
There are coal seams down there, but they have almost all fallen victim to the contortions of mountain building. The fact that the beds of coal have been crushed and distorted out of all recognition has had a profound effect on the local economy. It has not stopped miners from trying to pry the coal from beneath the ground—historically, very little dissuades them from that. But it has affected mightily the way in which the miners have over the centuries tried to do the prying. And it has made the actual process of mining very difficult indeed. Coal that is difficult to obtain is priced accordingly—it is very expensive. And it was this simple fact—that Somerset coal was so very costly to extract—that led to the decision to build a canal. If it were costly to mine but cheap to transport, Somerset coal might be competitive still: A canal was essential to keep the coalfield in action at all.
A cyclothem, or typical sequence of the rock types usually found close to a coal seam.
The fact that the tiny coalfield was wedged between two of the loveliest towns in southern England, Wells and Bath, was of little moment to the industrialists and profiteers who saw a chance to make money from the minerals below them. If this corner of rural England had to be made as charmless as Nottingham or County Durham, with the old stone villages defaced by winding gears and slag heaps, with the fields littered with cranes and coal barges and the air thick with smoke and the cry of steam whistles, then so be it. The English economy was changing, and fast, and it was imperative that the revolution be allowed to percolate into the slow-dropping peace of Somerset, for the good of all.
For it was a rich coalfield, and temptingly close to the big cities of the south, places like Bristol and Southampton and even London, where huge numbers of customers were now living and scores of new factories were being built. The coalfield’s backers believed it had potential. More than one hundred tons of coal were already being torn from below northern Somerset in 1690; and when in 1763 a landowner named Lansdown decided to bore an experimental shaft near his village of Radstock, and found a sizable coal seam five hundred feet down, and another one six hundred feet lower still, there occurred the beginnings of a coal rush.
Suddenly villages like Camerton, Foxcote, Timsbury, Writhlington, and High Littleton, hitherto sleepy and forgotten places of wisteria-covered houses and fields with heavy-uddered cows drowsing in the afternoon sun, became crowded with burly men in hard leather caps and black smocks, and the sound of hammering and pickaxing and the irregular thudding of Newcomen steam engines displaced the music of skylarks and church bells.
It was a difficult coalfield, too. Not only had the Variscan orogeny wrought havoc with the seams—some of them even plunged vertically downward and could only be worked by the miners almost standing on one another’s heads—but the roads in this part of Somerset were atrocious, thick with mud and as rough as the surface of the moon. John Wesley, the Methodist evangelist who once boasted that he regarded the whole world as his parish, found it difficult to include the North Somerset village of Midsomer Norton in his evangelical universe: It was so named, he wrote later, because the appalling local road conditions ensured it was only reachable in midsummer.
And then, in 1792, to make life even more difficult for the Somerset coal barons, Parliament was persuaded to pass the Monmouthshire Canal Act, which suddenly meant that South Wales coal, abundant and much simpler to work, could now become readily available on the Bristol market. This news resounded around Somerset like a death knell. The local collieries, it was feared, would be forced into ruin—unless, the owners decided, they also built a canal. If they could raise the funds and overcome the farmers’ objections, then they could have Somerset coal floated swiftly and cheaply right into the heart of Bath. Perhaps, since another new canal was just then being planned to push deep into the southern heart of England to join the Thames, it could be barged right into the heart of London as well.
And thus did canal mania come to cider country. By February 1, 1794, after a committee meeting at the White Hart Hotel in Bath to decide the route—deciding which collieries would be favored, which ignored—a bill had been drafted and approved. By April 17 such was the anxiety of the promoters to beat off competition from the beastly Welsh that Parliament had passed it and King George III had signed it. The first excavators and the navvies then moved in a few weeks later, beginning the cutting, shoveling, and concreting that would end in the making of twenty-five miles of perhaps the least-remembered (and, as it happened, soonest-ruined) canals to be created during that curiously energetic period in British industrial history.
The promoters who first decided the route of the canal took their lead from the man they quickly appointed as official surveyor to the project—an absurdly young apprentice, lately arrived from Oxfordshire, named William Smith.
The young man had come on impressively in the years since he was playing marbles with pundibs and marveling at the intricate beauty of pound stones. He had done tolerably well at school—though considering his family’s poverty, there was no thought that he might go on to university. He had an apparent aptitude for geometry, he could draw more than adequately, and he had an evident fascination for the rocks among which he lived. His diary and his memoirs record his growing eagerness to understand what was going on beneath the green of the Oxfordshire meadowlands.
There are entries recording how he found the whiteness of chalk extraordinary, and how he wondered why there were no stones in the Churchill fields on
which he could sharpen a knife or from which he could strike a spark. Notes tell how he collected crystals of fool’s gold—iron pyrite—that workmen had found when they were draining a great pond in the village of Sarsden, that he had marveled at how some farmers were using a local blue clay to color their barn doors rather than waste money on paint, and that he had stood for many minutes enraptured in front of the earth-cutting machines being used to make a road through the Chiltern Hills, near Henley. And, unromantic though it may sound to the modern ear, he became fascinated by everything that had to do with drains, drainage, natural springs, culverts, bogs, and pools—a fascination that is easier to understand if it is remembered that to farmers in central England, earth, sun, and water were all—the core of their existence—quite proper subjects for their obsessive concern.
By the time William Smith left school he was something of a sophisticate, not least because, as well as having a developed rural knowledge, he had also traveled much farther than most young men from farms in rural Oxfordshire. He had gone many times to London. He would write later that he remembered especially sitting on a wooden seat on a cowhouse to watch criminals being hanged from the gibbet at Tyburn. He had been only too well aware of the scale of the terrible anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780. He had experienced much of the Londoners’ unparalleled joy when Admiral George Rodney returned in triumph after routing the French fleet off Dominica. And he remembered the thick mud stalling the horsecarts in what is now the eminently fashionable quarter of Manchester Square.
His uncle—who, because of his name, was known by his nephew as “old William”—seems to have treated him reasonably well, if somewhat parsimoniously: He was exasperated, it seems, with what he regarded as his nephew’s effete habits—which by the time he was seventeen had extended beyond collecting brachiopods and echinoids to carving sundials in slabs of another local rock, the oolitic limestone of the Middle Jurassic.
Avuncular parsimony was nearly the boy’s undoing. William found it difficult to afford books for his studies and had to go so far as to ask his uncle for an advance against his will—and which was apparently only given grudgingly—for a few shillings to buy the volumes he needed. (He had to travel to Oxford to make any serious purchases: The nearest town of any consequence, Chipping Norton, had no bookshop, as Smith would later note—“except for two shops that sold pots and pans and which sold spelling books.”)
One of the volumes he did manage to acquire, however, was particularly well worthwhile: it was The Art of Measuring, by a man named Daniel Fenning,* and it was the book that introduced the young man to the skill that would become central to him for the rest of his adult life—the basic principles of surveying. And it was as he was carrying this book, walking down the single sloping village street of Churchill, that he eventually met the man who would change his life.
His name was Edward Webb, and he was a professional surveyor. His craft was all of a sudden big business in England. Roads were being built, country estates being measured and laid out to gardens, canals were being dug, rivers improved—and common lands enclosed. It was the business of enclosure that had brought Webb to Churchill.
A group of the West Oxfordshire local squires and the wealthier farmers, just like their opposite numbers in countless other towns and villages up and down the country, had decided to have the local fields apportioned privately, and farmed efficiently. A surveyor was needed, and Webb was brought over from Stow-on-the-Wold, ten miles away. The young Smith introduced himself—in his own rather fanciful attempt at an autobiography penned many years later he wrote that he met Webb entirely by chance and asked him some penetrating questions about modern surveying practices. By the day’s end, according to the diary Smith was now in the habit of keeping, today held in the library of the University Museum in Oxford, he had been hired to work as the assistant. This was the autumn of 1787. He was eighteen, and, informally educated though he may have been, he had a profession and a job.
It took him only a few months to master the basic skills. By the following spring he had learned how to use the pantograph and the theodolite, the dividers and the great steel chain. By the early summer of 1788 he was entrusted with doing his own work—the first opportunity arriving when one of Webb’s older assistants, who, it was whispered, drank, miscalculated the area of some allotments he had surveyed and made their owners order fences of the wrong size. William Smith did the measuring and the mensuration all over again, got everything right, and was promptly set up by Webb to survey other tracts of land on his own.
He and Webb then began to travel together—indeed, Webb and his family so liked the young man they had him move away from Churchill and his niggardly uncle and into their substantial house at Stow. From there he traveled, to a farm in Cricklade, to make a survey of the Sapperton Canal tunnel, to the Braydon Forest, to the Kineton coalfield in Warwickshire. He also traveled to the New Forest, where he sank a borehole, looking for coal for the charcoal-burning industry, which was then locally booming.
And by chance he also made brief but memorable contact with the one other celebrated former inhabitant of Churchill—the former governor-general of India, Warren Hastings.
For his entire career Hastings, who had been born in Churchill, had yearned to return to his father’s old estate at Daylesford, in Worcestershire, which his father had been compelled to sell because of what were delicately but opaquely described as “embarrassments arising out of the civil war” (between the seventeenth century’s Royalist and Parliamentary armies, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers). With the eighty thousand pounds that he brought back from his thirty-four years in India in 1785, Hastings eventually managed to buy the great house—though at the very time he completed the purchase he was embroiled in the notorious impeachment trial (for alleged cruelty and corruption in Calcutta) that was to last for seven years, ruining him and (though he was acquitted on all charges) forcing his retirement from public life.
As soon as he bought the old family house and its 650 acres (for eleven thousand pounds), he decided that he needed the grounds landscaped. And in the spring of 1788 he called in the by-now-well-known surveyor Edward Webb from Stow, and his young partner-apprentice, his Churchill-born former neighbor, William Smith.
In his daybook Smith records meeting Hastings—“the gouty great man [who] sat on his horse with his livery servant behind him.” The apprentice was rather harder on him than perhaps he needed to be: “Mr. Hastings,” he wrote, “decided to be satisfied of my competency for the task, [and so] I had to sit down and draw him a sketch [of what was intended]. But in giving his instructions I was surprised at his ignorance of the scale to which he requested his maps to be enlarged.” So, to add to the rigors of his trial before the House of Lords, the old governor-general now had a young whippersnapper of a neighbor arching an eyebrow at his poor reading of maps! The trials of public life, he may well have reflected, can be great indeed.
This was, in general, an important time for William Smith—his fondness for travel, for the life of a gypsy rover, seems to have begun in earnest during the late summer and autumn of 1788; and with it—to judge by his diaries, which are forever noting the presence of this rock here and that rock there and the importance of this cliff or that valley, those rivers or that spring—a growing knowledge of and intimacy with the topography, and the wonder at what lay beneath it.
He was no great diarist; but once in a while his entries make one wish he had been a better one. His travels, and all that he saw during them, would have produced in more competent hand a glorious portrait of country life in late-eighteenth-century England:
[A]fter crossing the naked hills from Stow, joyously with the thoughts of being trusted to survey an estate myself, I saw from the edge of Broadway Hill what appeared to me one of the most glorious sights in the world, and I well remember standing some time to gaze over the immense extent of the rich country below. The day was fine and the Vale of Evesham lay below me spread out like a map, the fruit trees and
hedges being all whitened with the finest blossom that ever was known. I advanced into this rich country to survey an estate at Inkborough, in the midst of apple trees. In the year before there had been a most abundant crop of fruit, so that cyder was exceedingly plentiful; and by the blossoms, another stock of that cheering beverage might be expected, for which the growers feared they could not find stowage, their casks being then all full. But before long these fears were dissipated, for the weather changed to wet and cold, the apples fell off before they had attained the size of walnuts, and the barley and other corn on the stiff lands I had to survey turned to yellow in the furrows and in all moist places. Most of the estate was upon the Red Marl which, in its redness, astonished me more than any other kind of soil I had seen.
He finally arrived in Somerset in 1791, on another mission from Edward Webb of Stow. Here he was to make a valuation survey, on his own, of an estate in the pretty village of Stowey that had recently been willed to a local grandee and coal mine owner named Lady Elizabeth Jones.* Characteristically, it being a warm and fine summer, the fares on the trans-Cotswold post-chaise being higher than it seemed prudent to pay, and, since a trek of fifty miles seemed to Smith no more than a casual stroll (as it would to most hardened geologists even now), he decided to walk.
He traveled along the roads the Romans built: After making southbound along the country roads he struck southwest along the remains of Akeman Street first, which took him from Burford down to Cirencester, and then turned on a more southerly route, via the Fosse Way to Tetbury and the old Roman settlement and pleasuredrome of Bath. After that, keeping to the hills to the south and west around the spa, he walked by way of Radstock, Odd Down, Stoneaston, and Temple Cloud—coalfield villages all—until, finally, he reached the vast acreages of the Jones estate.