The 19th-century Irish polymath most brilliantly meets the 20th-century cosmopolitan specialist in the imaginative, pragmatic genius of the great Frank Mitchell. In many ways the heir of Sir William Wilde, Frank Mitchell of the rampaging curiosity matched not only Wilde's astonishing diversity, scholarly range and intellectual energy, but also his efficiency. Both mastered the art of thinking while also getting things done. Both had their careers, particularly Mitchell, shaped by the defining influence of the Royal Irish Academy. Both were awarded the Academy's greatest honour, the Cunningham Medal. In 1989, Mitchell became its first recipient in 104 years, some 116 years after Wilde had been similarly honoured.
The first professor of quaternary studies at Trinity College, Dublin, Mitchell, a career geologist elected to the Royal Irish Academy in 1940, was a founder member of An Taisce and later its president from 1991-92. He also served as president of the Royal Irish Academy. His photograph hangs at the entrance to the reading room. His presidential address, 'Planning for Irish Archaeology in the Eighties', delivered on October 9th, 1978, led to the initial foundation of the Heritage Council, which in turn produced the "Discovery" programme of the early 1990s. Reading that speech now in the context of the ongoing tensions and balances sought between heritage and development, Mitchell's foresight emerges with daunting clarity - as does Ireland's ongoing debt to him.
In an age of increasingly narrow specialisation, Mitchell consistently proved it was possible to combine specialist knowledge with a multidisciplinary overview, drawing on geology, botany, zoology, geography and archaeology as well as daring and common-sense. In later life he described himself as a landscape archaeologist. It was Mitchell who published, at the age of 82, the extraordinary essay, 'Where Has Ireland Come From?' (Country House, 1994). Drawn from a 13-part radio lecture series conducted in the form of a dialogue, it is an exciting narrative in which Mitchell leads a team of geologists and naturalists aboard a magic carpet, taking them through 1,700 million years of geological history, beginning at Inishtrahull, a tiny island eight kilometres north-west of the Inishowen coast of Co Donegal and host to Ireland's oldest known rock.
For many he will remain famous as the author of the classic, Reading the Irish Landscape, his geologically-based survey of Ireland that went through a couple of guises en route to becoming - in its final revised and enlarged form, co-authored with Michael Ryan in 1997 - the most complete and multifaceted book about Ireland. On his retirement from Trinity in 1977, he became increasingly active as a broadcaster, drawing on the same dry wit and feel for snappy one-liners that had marked his lecturing.
He also took to writing. Aside from The Irish Landscape, which would evolve into Reading the Irish Landscape, he wrote The Way That I Followed (1990), an autobiography of sorts, recording his engagement with Ireland while also acknowledging Robert Lloyd Praeger's journey, The Way That I Went, published in 1937.
Mitchell the naturalist was born at the age of 11 when he set off with his notebook to the Natural History Museum in Dublin. There he met the first in a series of mentors, Arthur Wilson Stelfox (1883-1972), an entomologist and museum curator who had noticed the boy studying the displays of native Irish birds. Stelfox bred snails in his garage and tried to interest the young Mitchell in insects, particularly the then under-examined bee. But Mitchell remained intent on birds.
Another of his early mentors was J.P. Brunker, author of Flora of the County Wicklow, who took the boy on many plant and bird-watching expeditions. In 1926, again through Stelfox, Mitchell, then 13, found himself joining an English group of cavers who had come to Ireland to look for bones in a cave in Co Waterford. Even during the most intense periods of his academic career, he would always remain a field man, no doubt largely due to his formative experiences as a member of the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club.
George Francis Mitchell had been born in Dublin on October 15th 1912, the second of three children, to David William Mitchell and Frances Elizabeth Mitchell. The Mitchell family had arrived in Ireland from Scotland during the mid-19th century. It was a business clan. Frank Mitchell's father had, with his brother, purchased a hardware shop, Hodges, on Aston Quay. They also sold furniture and some antiques.
Raised mainly in Harold's Cross, young Mitchell did not feature among the stars at high school, then in Harcourt Street, although his elder brother, David, later a doctor, had done well. Mitchell's mother seemed more anxious about Frank getting to Trinity than he himself was, largely because his father had missed the chance.
Thanks to a friend deciding not to take up the school's Erasmus Smith Foundation Scholarship, Mitchell was able to secure it by default. He set off to Trinity in 1930, where he chose English and French. This mistake was quickly rectified - discouraged Mitchell from pursuing the arts any further. He turned to the natural sciences instead.
At first disappointed that so much time was spent in labs rather than in the field, he nevertheless discovered the lure of college scholarships and their power to confer money and independence. He finally began to study with a competitive edge, and the results more than justified the effort.
He won a college Foundation Scholarship, freeing himself of fees and rent. Deciding to specialise in zoology while also studying geology, he was awarded a first-class honours degree in 1934. The newly appointed professor of geology, Louis Bouvier Smyth, whom Mitchell knew from the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club, then asked him to consider specialising in geology. Mitchell did so - and became Smyth's assistant.
In 1940 he was appointed lecturer in geology, becoming a fellow of Trinity College in 1944. At around the same time, he also decided to attend undergraduate archaeology lectures given at UCD by the new professor of archaeology, Sean P. O Riordain.
His future as a research scientist had already been largely determined by the Royal Irish Academy. In 1933, the Academy had established a committee for quaternary research in Ireland. Its secretary was Tony Farrington, then the Academy's resident secretary and, in time, possibly Mitchell's closest mentor. The following year the committee invited Knud Jessen, professor of botany at the University of Copenhagen and an international pioneering figure in quaternary research, to participate. On Monday, July 9th 1934, Jessen and his team began work at Ballybetagh bog, near Kilternan in the Dublin mountains, an area rich in find-fragments of the Irish giant deer.
Among those present to be trained in the methodology of quaternary study, representing Trinity College, was Frank Mitchell, then aged 21. It was an historic episode in Irish scholarship, and a later Jessen visit was recorded in The Way That I Went by Praeger, who was also present. Mitchell quickly established a friendship and research relationship with Jessen that continued, despite some interruption during the war years, until the Dane's death in 1971.
From 1945 until becoming registrar in 1952, Mitchell was junior dean. By then he was married and had two daughters. It is interesting that although Trinity did not and does not have a department of archaeology, he was reader in Irish archaeology from 1959 to 1965, when the job title which best suited him, the chair in quaternary studies, was devised.
The Townley Hall estate, including Francis Johnston's classical mansion designed in 1794, had been sold to Trinity College in 1956. It was to be used as an agricultural research centre. Mitchell's connections with Townley Hall had also led to some excavation work on the estate that eventually brought George Eogan to Knowth. When Trinity's agricultural project faltered and the farm was sold off, Mitchell and his wife decided in 1969 to buy the house with some land. Lucy Mitchell ran it as a study centre. After her death in 1987, Mitchell moved into the former gardener's cottage.
Life in retirement saw Mitchell determined not to "hang around" Trinity. Among his several projects was 'Man and Environment in Valencia Island' (Royal Irish Academy, 1989). The island would remain an interest, as would nearby Mellifont Abbey (see picture), the first Cistercian House in Ireland. Now largely in ruins, the abbey's fine vaulted chapter house has been restored. Mitchell was particularly involved with plans to restore the centre basin of the octagonal two-storey lavabo.
Another of his later studies was 'The Great Bog of Ardee'. It is a fascinating account of the bog and its landscape from the Ice Age, through the 13th century (when the burghers of the new Norman town of Ardee began to cut turf there) and on to the present.
Weeks before his death, Mitchell was back at Valencia, watching at the window, painting a watercolour of the great Skellig as he waited for the rain to stop. Although he lived in Co Louth for more than 30 years, he remained an old-style gracious Dublin gentleman in manner, if utterly modern in outlook. He certainly had no intention of dying quite as abruptly as he seemed to.
Few deaths at 85 have been regarded as so untimely as that on November 25th 1997 of Frank Mitchell, whose voice is more needed than ever as Ireland attempts to come to terms with exactly what heritage means.