A DISTINGUISHED RESIDENT

Bath Gardens were originally laid out by White Watson; a polymath, who combined his skills as a craftsman with pioneering scientific scholarship. Born in 1760, White’s unusual forename was his mother’s maiden name. He was from a long line of stoneworkers and masons, his grandfather Samuel Watson having produced some of the exquisite carvings in wood and stone at Chatsworth House. His uncle was Henry Watson, of the marble mill in Ashford, and White helped him run his business. White, too, made his living mainly as a sculptor and carver, with the coat of arms on the Rutland Hotel and a sundial and funeral monuments at All Saints among his commissions. But his main passion was geology, an interest which began as a child, when he roamed local quarries collecting minerals and fossils, and he turned part of his home, Bath House, into a museum of archaeology and geology. White became one of the first people to study the emerging science of stratigraphy: the way in which rocks were laid down and the land shaped over millennia. He had the innovative idea of demonstrating geological strata by producing tablets made up of the rocks involved. He inlaid slabs of Ashford black marble with toadstones, gritstones and limestones, at the correct orientations, all threaded with mineral veins, to show the underlying rock formations of Derbyshire and neighbouring counties. Although he is thought to have made 100 of these tablets, the whereabouts of only 25 are known. White was elected to the Linnean Society in 1795 and corresponded with such luminaries as Erasmus Darwin, Sir Joseph Banks and William Buckland, publishing several forward-thinking papers, and, in 1811, his book A Delineation of the Strata of Derbyshire. He indulged in the Georgian passion for silhouettes, cutting them in paper and carving them in marble, as well as writing poetry and keeping notes on life in Bakewell. He and his wife, Ann, are buried in All Saints churchyard.