An Irishwoman's Diary

THE 19th-century Irish polymath committed to antiquarianism meets the 20th-century cosmopolitan specialist in the imaginative and pragmatic genius of Frank Mitchell, who was born 100 years ago.

As the first professor of quaternary studies at Trinity College, Dublin, Mitchell, best known for his classic Reading the Irish Landscape, a geologically-based survey of Ireland, was a career geologist, a founder member of An Taisce, a president of the Royal Irish Academy, an inspirational teacher and the straight-talking, drily witty son of a Dublin hardware merchant.

A modern day version of Sir William Wilde, Mitchell was a thinker who in a society of talkers was adept at getting things done.

In a time of increasingly narrow specialisation, he consistently demonstrated that it is possible to combine specialist knowledge with a multidisciplinary overview, drawing together geology, botany, zoology, geography and archaeology, as well as intellectual daring and commonsense. Eventually Mitchell, precise as ever, would describe himself as a landscape archaeologist. His extraordinary essay Where Has Ireland Come From?, published when he was 82, was based on a 13-part radio lecture series conducted in the form of a dialogue in which Mitchell leads a team of geologist and naturalists perched upon a magic carpet, through 1,700 million years of geological history. The starting point is Inishtrahull, a tiny island north-west of the Inishowen, Co Donegal coast and host to Ireland’s oldest-known rock.

Mitchell the naturalist came of age at 11 when he set off to the Natural History Museum. There he met the first of his mentors, Arthur Wilson Stelfox (1883-1972), a museum curator who was also an entomologist. He noticed the boy studying the displays of native Irish birds. Stelfox bred snails in his garage and attempted to interest the young Mitchell in insects, but the boy was intent on birds. In 1926, through Stelfox, Mitchell, then 13, joined a party of amateur naturalists who had come over from England to explore a cave in Co Waterford. His formative experiences as a member of the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club left him with a lifelong belief in field work.

He was born in Dublin on October 15th, 1912, the middle of three children, his sister Helen Lillias (1916-2000), would become an arts and crafts artist much in the tradition of the Yeats sisters; while his elder brother David became a doctor. It was Mitchell’s mother, not Frank, who decided that he would go to Trinity. On arrival there in 1930 he chose English and French but was quickly discouraged by an arrogant French lecturer – Samuel Beckett. Mitchell abandoned the arts and turned to his passion, the natural sciences.

Although disappointed that more time was spent in the lab than the field, he did well and was awarded a first class honours degree in 1934. The then newly appointed professor of geology, Louis Bouvier Smyth, who knew Mitchell through the Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club, suggested that Mitchell specialise in geology – and he became Smyth’s assistant. By 1940 Mitchell was a lecturer in geology. Four years later he began attending archaeology lectures at UCD given by the then recently appointed professor of archaeology, Seán Ó Riordáin. Yet Mitchell’s multidisciplinary methodology was already well evolved.

Years earlier in 1934, Mitchell, then only 21, had, through Tony Farrington of the Royal Irish Academy, worked with an invited team headed by Knud Jessen, then professor of botany at the University of Copenhagen. The project was based at Ballybetagh bog in the Dublin mountains. A subsequent Jessen visit would be recorded by Robert Lloyd Praeger in The Way That I Went (1937). Praeger’s classic, which charts a somewhat random account of travelling through Ireland would later inspire Mitchell’s response, The Way That I Followed (1990), a more methodical narrative. His life was closely bound to Trinity College. The college had purchased the Townley Hall estate, situated on the Slane Road to Drogheda, near historic Oldbridge, in 1956. Included in the property was Francis Johnston’s classical mansion designed in 1794. It was to be used as an agricultural research centre. It was Mitchell who brought archaeologist George Eogan to excavate a site at Townley Hall which then led on to Eogan’s life’s work, the excavation of nearby Knowth.

In retirement Mitchell championed the cause of Mellifont Abbey and was particularly devoted to the restoration of the splendid lavabo there. Weeks before his death on November 25th, 1997, he was at Valencia, painting a watercolour of the great Skellig, waiting for the rain to stop.