Geoheritage Festival Zoom Talk – Matthew Forster Heddle

Hamish Johnston on his relative Matthew Forster Heddle, mountaineer and mineralogist.

Matthew Forster Heddle: Hub of the Highlands Controversy

“Hamish Johnston is great-great grandson and biographer of Prof. Matthew Forster Heddle (1828-1897), best known as Scotland’s greatest mineralogist. Hamish himself is a retired HR director and Munroist.

The talk will reveal Heddle’s love affair with Sutherland, devoting a geological map and six of his thirteen major County Geognosy papers to it.  Because Heddle’s work there lasted some 20 years and began before the start of the Highlands Controversy, he was able to make a significant and continuous contribution to the debate right up to its conclusion. Heddle knew and worked with all the main players involved.  The talk ends with an account of Heddle as mountaineer who had his own list of 3000-foot Scottish mountains before Munro published his 1881 Tables, and climbed 357 of them.  Munro acknowledged him as having climbed more Scottish peaks than anyone else.”

Register for the Matthew Forster Heddle Talk