Ever the eager student

NATURALIST, former Professor of Quaternary Studies at Trinity College Dublin and former president of the Royal Irish Academy, Frank Mitchell holds "a curiosity best described as insatiable and the great good luck to meet up with some remarkable minds" responsible for a uniquely wide ranging academic career encompassing geology, botany, archaeology, geography, social history and ornithology.

Author of The Way That I Followed (1990) and, of course, the best selling Reading The Irish Landscape, his geologically based classic which has gone through several guises en route to becoming, in its new revised and enlarged form, probably the most complete study undertaken about this country, Mitchell the teacher has never lost his enthusiasm. In many ways he has always remained the eager student and has never forgotten the influence the late Danish botanist Knud Jessen, Professor of Botany at the University of Copenhagen, had on his life and work.

Now 84, Mitchell is the last surviving exponent of a 19th century, polymath tradition immersed in a multi faceted form of scholarship which has become lost in our age of narrow specialisation. In the 1940s, already a college lecturer, he attended undergraduate archaeology lectures out of interest.

He is a lively character, a Dublin gentleman as gracious as he is exact, possessing a dry humour ideally suited to the ironic one liners he delivers with ease and perfect timing. For all his old world meticulousness, he is utterly of this century, down to his Reebok shoes and occasional Americanisms such as "crummy" or a favourite when he feels tired, "I think I've run out of gas".

His interests became his life's work. "Even as a boy I was interested in birds and field natural history." His mother organised outings to the countryside. "When I was about 11, I began to keep a notebook about birds and this led me to the Natural History Museum. I soon became quite a regular and this was noted by one of the staff there." Arthur Stelfox, Mitchell's earliest mentor, was an entomologist and also specialised in freshwater pond snails. He was also a man of singular genius whose work at the museum centred on identifying animal bones where he provided valuable assistance to archaeologists, often castigating them for their heavy handed handling of vulnerable artifacts.

Initially he had tried to interest the young Mitchell in insects, but the boy was already committed to birds. Within two years, under Stelfox's guidance, the boy had joined a group of English cave diggers exploring a cave in Co Waterford.

It was the beginning of a long career as a field scientist. Despite his years as an academic, lecturing in geology and archaeology, he has always described himself as "a field man". He makes no great claims for himself as a schoolboy scholar, remarking that had his father had his wish he would have followed him into the family firm. "But my mother, knowing my father had not gone to college, wept at the thought, and so I got the chance to go to Trinity."

Arriving there in 1930, he decided to pursue an arts degree, "learning French appeared to be a practical thing to do". However the combined impact of the Shakespeare scholar, W.F. Trench, an overly theatrical English professor and the dour Samuel Beckett then lecturing in French - "he didn't bother much with the less than brilliant, he was quite rude and struck me as a misfit" - soon convinced Mitchell of the greater attractions of natural sciences.

Born in October 1912, Frank Mitchell's earliest memory is of being a toddler on holiday with his family in Bray as the 1916 Easter Rising began. "My father was very worried about the business and he set off into town on the train. I was three and a half. I can remember hearing my father's voice as the phone was held for me." His memory of the first World War is equally vivid. "I remember we were swimming at Rush, Co Dublin. There was a lot of talk about German submarines. We were convinced some German soldier was hiding under the water with a cutlass waiting to slice our legs off."

Although a good talker, he tends not to talk about himself. His anecdotes are more rooted in facts, discoveries and should he mention the famous naturalists, archaeologists or geographers of an earlier generation be it Praeger, MacAlister, Estyn Evans O'Riordain, it is in the context of an event, a excavation, a discovery. Ask him about Robert Lloyd Praeger (1865-1953) who was born the same year as Yeats and who Mitchell knew originally through the Dublin Field Club, he says: "I knew him only as an old man." Of the Belfast man who trained as an engineer only to become increasingly committed to botany, Mitchell reiterates: "He contributed greatly to our knowledge of field botany." Ever the perfectionist, Mitchell points out that Praeger neither discovered, nor did he claim to discover, the climatic optimum as is often attributed to him.

It could be argued that with The Way That I Followed, Mitchell wrote his autobiography, albeit a career based one. But he says that book, written in the form of a journey throughout Ireland, is not an autobiography, "nor is it some attempt to match Praeger, I was interested in offering the contrasts in the scientific scene between his time and mine". Praeger's classic The Way That I Went (1937) adopted a zig zagged route, Mitchell claims his is more winding "and of course I had the advantage of technological improvements unknown to Praeger".

HIS childhood began in Harolds Cross, before the family moved to Rathmines and later, Rathgar. Mitchell and his older brother attended The High School, then in Harcourt Street. It was a city upbringing and even now, having lived for more than 30 years in Co Louth, Mitchell remains a city man. Or rather, his own man, a self contained cosmopolitan capable of walking in and out of various worlds.

Of his father, David Mitchell, he says: "He was an intelligent man but he had had to leave school early because of his father's death and he went to work in a stockbroker's office. I shouldn't think he was overly wild about that but I don't know. Then his elder brother suggested they buy a business and they bought Hodges, an ironmonger's on Aston's Quay, where the USIT offices are now. They also sold furniture upstairs and my uncle became involved in antiques, my father ran the shop. His interests never went beyond the firm, his church and his garden and his family." While Mitchell's brother, also David, now deceased, went on to become a successful doctor and president of the Royal Academy of Medicine, his sister, Lillias, three years his Junior, is an artist, exhibiting regularly with the Watercolour Society of Ireland. She also sculpts.

By the 1950s, Mitchell was married, living in Merrion Square, the father of two daughters and as busy as ever lecturing, writing, researching, travelling. In 1957, Trinity College was advised to buy Townley Hall, just outside Drogheda, as a working farm for the School of Agriculture. Designed by Francis Johnston for the untitled gentleman landowner Blaney Townley Balfour, the house was completed about 1798 and two years later the Balfours moved in. Regarded as Johnston's master work, it is the perfect neoclassical house: severe, lucid and uncluttered. The approach is across the road from one of the widest bends of the Boyne. Townley Hall sits on a square block of grey shale on the crown of a shallow hill, just above where the limestone ends and the shale takes over, literally at the river. The long, slightly climbing, tree lined driveway widens to reveal the house which dominates the view,

For 15 years the big house was Frank Mitchell's home after he bought it from Trinity in a Land Commission deal. His wife, Lucy, ran it as students' retreat and study hall. Long term residents included, Prof George Eogan who often made it his headquarters while working on the nearby Knowth site. Soon after Lucy's death following a long illness in 1987, Mitchell moved into, the estate's former gardener's cottage. It is a modest and business like house, like Mitchell himself who lives in sparse tidiness and is only now regretting his habit of giving books away at random. "It is annoying when you go to check something, the very book you want is gone."

Having just spent three years revising and adding new material to Reading the Irish Landscape, he seems pleased with the outcome. The new book is the result of a collaboration with the archaeologist Michael Ryan, now director of the Chester Beatty Library.

Extended by more than 150 pages, the original text has been up dated, even rewritten. "It is, in fact," he says with some understatement, "a new book. Do you like the cover?" It is an atmospheric photograph of a Connemara lake, Lough Shindile, near Maam Cross, caught in the bright, after rain light.

At present Mitchell is busily examining aerial photographs of Valencia Island. "This was taken by the Ordnance Survey," he says, pointing to the various features. Involved in the Wood Quay saga, a corner of his Archaeology And Environment In Early Dublin is barely visible under a stack of papers. Yet he works in order. Much of Mitchell's information is logged in his head. His memory is impressive, as is his imagination. This is the naturalist who in an astonishingly daring pamphlet, Where Has Ireland Come From? (Country House, 1994), drawn from a 13 part lecture series, wrote an exciting narrative in which a group of naturalists board a magic carpet and defy time to embark on a 1700 million year geological tour of Ireland.

Looking out on the park, he says few of Balfour's original trees still stand. "The walnut there has finally died, that was one of Balfour's trees." Mitchell refers to the lone Sequoia in the driveway he is responsible for. It is the master shoot from the stump of one of Balfour's original Sequoias. "I also planted that Eucalyptus there as a gesture when I came back from a trip to Australia. And that Tulip there.

Although he retired from Trinity College in 1977, having spent a year touring the US with an exhibition of early Christian Irish art, Mitchell is currently, working on another Valencia, Island project. In 1989 the Royal Irish Academy published his short study, Man And Environment In Valencia Island. Convinced that the island should be protected as a national treasure, he refers to its rich antiquities, dating from the arrival some 6,500 years ago of Mesolithic peoples to the industrial archaeology of quarries and lighthouses, the legacy of the past 100 years. At present he is working on a 20 hectare area of formerly tilled ground.

"I'd call it a tattered agricultural palimpsest," he says of the site which chronicles 1,000 years of settlement from early Christian through Norman and up until the 17th century. "As far as I can make out there has been no cultivation since the 19th century. There is no evidence of Famine activity. Why was it so attractive to the early settlers and then ignored by the Famine people?" he asks, before suggesting: "It is fully opened to every gale driven in by the Atlantic the soil may be poisoned by sea salt. We are about to start testing it.

Exchanging his leather brogues for his Reeboks, Mitchell fetches his old tweed coat, a cap and a stick, to lead the way to the great bog of Ardee some 10 miles west of Townley Hall. Not only is he the perfect navigator, the short journey becomes a master class in reading the landscape, explaining it in terms of archaeology and history as well a geology. Although Mitchell claims not to be "overly much interested in history", he invariably places landscape in its, historical context.

"There's a Bronze Age site there", he points out the five or six Norman mottes, explains the flow of the river, the gradient, of the land and, approaching the bog, says he first came upon it "when I went on a picnic".

In the 13th century, the fledging burgher class of the new Norman town of Ardee won the right to cut turf, from the great bog which now serves as part of the boundary between Co Meath and Co Louth. Spanning some seven kilometres or four miles, the basin it occupies first appeared about 10,000 years ago as the ice withdrew from Ireland. Here it left a barrier of sand and gravel lying across the valley. Before the arrival of the Neolithic farmers about 5,000 years ago, the whole area was covered in dense forest. Now only bog birch and some pine remain. In the postElizabethan era, several large estates dominated the area. Early this century the Land Commission redistributed the land. The bog now has a network of roads criss crossing it. Mitchell is, constantly noting new alterations, further signs of human activity. Standing at Corstown Lake west, the larger of the bog lakes, he points to the slanting lakeside pines supported only by bog.

About 10 miles from the bog, at the ruins of Mellifont Abbey, the first Cistercian house in Ireland, an Office of Public Works team overseen by William Cumming is battling the rogue water leaking from the abbey's original water system in order to attempt to dry out the chapter house. "The Cistercians had laid out the entire plumbing system, they had huge big kitchens, an infirmary and needed an elaborate water system." Another part of the abbey is preoccupying Mitchell: "Roger Stalley (Professor of Fine Arts at Trinity College) and myself want to restore the central basin of the lavabo." It had first come to his notice in 1958 when John Hunt had pointed to a piece of stone being used as a door stop at Townley Hall. "He said, `look after that, it's 12th century'." It was a piece of the lavabo. To date an OPW artist's impression has been drawn and several pieces have been assembled at the main site. The framed drawing is currently hanging in Mitchell's bathroom. "I'm hopeful the restoration will be completed."

AS he is photographed for The Irish Times at Mellifont Mitchell comments: "I don't know what anyone will make of an old man leaning on a wall. I'm sure I look more decrepit than the abbey itself."

It has been a long life. He has lived through two world wars and more importantly has witnessed the shaping of modern Ireland. Mitchell does not lament the passing of time nor its effect on him. But he has been known to say: "I'd trade my soul with the Devil in exchange for another 40 years."

Although he laughs on hearing his comment repeated, he says: "I think I must have been inspired by a remarkable performance I once saw of Hilton Edwards as Marlowe's Dr Faustus, but yes, I probably would such a deal. Things are really hotting up. There are so many new discoveries, I'd like to be around for them."

Having spent a lifetime travelling Ireland as a lover of nature as well as in his various scientific guises, has he a favourite place? "Oh yes, on Valencia. It's a special spot just west of the great cliff at Fogher on the northside of the island. There is a trackless, heathery, seaward slope looking across to the Dingle Peninsula. Nothing built by human hand can be seen ravens and, choughs circle overhead; I could lie there forever."