I live on the outskirts of Penclawdd, a north Gower village originally renowned for its coal mines and its copper and bronze works, and now for its long history of harvesting cockles. Ironically, given our location and some Dutch heritage, my small family was initially unaware that kokkel is the Dutch word for cockle and that Kokelaar means ‘cockle picker’. I now pick fine cockles from the sands at Whiteford and Broughton, and mussels from elsewhere on Gower.

I attended Penclawdd Junior School, Gowerton Grammar School and Llandaff Tech. I obtained a ‘first’ in BSc Geology at Prifysgol Aberystwyth (Aberystwyth University), an MSc in Geochemistry at the University of Oxford and a PhD from Aberystwyth University. After 10 years of teaching and research at Ulster University I transferred to the University of Liverpool as Reader in Geology and then became the George Herdman Professor of Geology.

I retired as George Herdman Professor in 2014. I had studied mainly physical processes of volcanic activity, including geophysical fluid dynamics, geochemistry and structural geology. Primarily a field geologist, I undertook many seasons of research in Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia, the Lake District and Glencoe, as well as on numerous volcanoes worldwide. I dived on the deep roots of ancient volcanoes off northwest Scotland, for example at St Kilda, and on active volcanoes off coasts of Iceland (Surtsey and Heimaey) and New Zealand (White Island). I recently focused on debris flows and avalanches, involving laboratory experiments and also field studies of the 1980 eruption of Mount St Helens, USA, and the Minoan eruption of Santorini, Greece. Latterly I described avalanche phenomena in craters on the Moon, using astonishingly detailed photographs taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.

In 2013 I was awarded the Murchison Medal of The Geological Society, for “a significant contribution to geology by means of a substantial body of research and for contributions to ‘hard’ rock studies”, but mostly I had simply enjoyed myself out of doors. After a largely enjoyable career with considerable ‘Boy’s Own Adventures’ I am now happy to range simply around Gower and Wales again. This was significantly enhanced by the companionship of ‘Charlie’, a Large Munsterlander (2007-2021).

Revisiting old haunts for fun and for the book, I haul myself up what probably was once a chimney above the Bronze-Age hearth discovered inside Tooth Cave on Gower (July 2019).