Chapter 5 John Marr and Alfred Harker

Abstract As we have seen, the main 'professional' mapping of the Lakes was more or less completed by the 1880s, though the Survey continued to publish memoirs on the region for some time after finishing the fieldwork, before returning to the region in the twentieth century to revisit some of the old questions; and then it undertook a major resurvey after 1982 (see Chapter 14). So it was that much of the detailed research from the 1880s to the outbreak of World War I was undertaken by 'amateurs'. Of these, the most important were Nicholson, whose ideas were discussed in Chapter 3, John Postlethwaite (see Chapter 6), John Edward Marr (1857-1933) and J. F. N. Green (see Chapter 6). There are good archival sources on Marr, in that all 65 of his field notebooks and an unnumbered 'journal' survive at the Sedgwick Museum, together with a few letters.1 The notebooks reveal that from 1874 until 1927 Marr spent a substantial part of almost every year in the Lakes; and he wrote what became the standard book on Lakeland geology for many years (Marr 1916). 2 To my knowledge, rather little on Green has survived beyond his published works. Marr's family came from Bolton-le-Sands in Lancashire, and he attended school at Lancaster Grammar. While there, he made the acquaintance of the Surveyor Richard Tiddeman, then working in the district, and accompanied him on several field-trips. Marr's unnumbered journal (for 1874-1876) shows that he was examining human remains in caves near Settle, looking at