Corner of Yorkshire: The Sedgwick Memorial
Adam Sedgwick was born in 1785, the third child of the vicar of St Andrew’s Church in the Yorkshire Dales village of Dent, and went on to become Professor of geology at Cambridge.
He is remembered as one of the founders of modern geology, and after he died in 1873 this impressive memorial was commissioned and erected in Dent’s cobbled market place, a team of eight horses transporting the stone into the village. Roughly hewn from a seam of pink granite found nearby, a trough at its base was supplied by a fountain cut into the stone. For a time this was Dent’s only source of drinking water.
Charles Darwin was one of Sedgwick’s students. They visited Wales together on a field trip in the summer of 1831 and kept up a regular correspondence while Darwin was on his famous Beagle expedition. There is exhibition on Sedgwick’s life at the Dent Heritage Centre.