Name Index

To

Prehistoric Torbay

Trans. Devon. Assoc. vol.  XXVIII (1896), pp. 533-546.

by

Alexander Somervail

Prepared by Michael Steer

The Paper was presented at the Association’s July 1896 Ashburton meeting. In it the author provides a wide-ranging retrospective on a period of the human past before written records were kept, which, in Torbay, stretches from the depths of the last Ice Age to around AD 43 the year of the Roman invasion. Modern Archaeologists divide this enormous span of time into several different periods each with their own characteristics: the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic eras. Mr Somervail’s paper provides, for the genealogist, a treasury of names and places associated with some of the earliest research on Torbay’s unique geology. The author, Alexander Somervail (1841–1910) was a retired master stationer from Edinburgh, who had moved to Torquay in the early 1880s and was to become Honorary Secretary of the Torquay Natural History Society, a post he held for some 20 years, between 1890 and 1910. Mr. Somervail and his colleagues, particularly William Pengelly, Arthur Hunt, and Richard Nicholls Worth, became involved in most of the important geological issues of the day that particularly related to the Westcountry. The Paper, from a copy of a rare journal can be downloaded from the Internet Archive. Google has sponsored the digitisation of books from several libraries. Those on which copyright has expired, are available for free educational and research use, both as individual books and as full collections to aid researchers.