This account of the historical geographies of science in nineteenth-century Cornwall begins, perhaps surprisingly, in 1728. In February of that year a young rector by the name of William Borlase made a chance discovery of a bronze-age urn in a barrow on Castle-an-Dinas hill in his own parish of Ludgvan, near Penzance, in west Cornwall. He duly reported this find to Thomas Tonkin, a local antiquary. This discovery awakened Borlase's interest in the cultural and natural histories of his own county – an interest he pursued until his death in 1772 – and that impelled him to seek connections with persons of similar interests. Borlase has since become an emblem for a particular sort of provincial scholar – often referred to as the ‘clerical naturalist’ – in eighteenth-century England, as well as, in some fields of inquiry at least, a figure who was at the forefront of scientific debates at a national level.

At a county level it has been argued that Borlase was really the only person who was pursuing intellectual inquiry to any serious degree in mid-eighteenth-century Cornwall and by extension has been positioned as the progenitor of science in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Whether this latter claim is actually true is not of concern here. The fact that researchers in the fields of meteorology, natural history, antiquarianism and geology in nineteenth-century Cornwall all saw Borlase as their intellectual forefather means that it is imperative that he is introduced here. It is also useful to begin with Borlase because the agendas he set with regards to the operations of science in the provinces as well as to the scientific study of place were markedly different to those that were pursued in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Cornwall. In other words, Borlase helps us to reflect on the particular ways in which science in Victorian Cornwall was carried out.

This chapter begins by discussing the provincial ‘clerical naturalists’ of the eighteenth century and their motivation for conducting studies of their home counties and the means by which they did so.