A MUSEUM celebrating the work of the man regarded as one of the fathers of British geology re-opens next week after a £4.4m restoration.

The Rotunda on Scarborough's seafront is a grade II-listed building that has been fully restored with the help of £1.9m from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

It celebrates the work of William Smith, whose discoveries more than 200 years ago became the basis of mineral and oil exploration today.

He was the son of a country blacksmith in Oxfordshire who in the late 18th-century solved one of the great puzzles of the age - how to recognise the sequence of rocks and correlate them across the country, on the basis of the fossils they contain.

He struggled against the suspicion of members of the Geological Society to publish the first geological map of England and Wales in 1815.

His geological maps were plagiarised and he was financially ruined. It was only when he went to Scarborough, after release from debtor's prison, that he finally gained recognition.

The Rotunda Museum was opened in 1829 and was one of the country's first purpose built museums. It is the only building in the world to commemorate Smith's invention of "fossil-ordered stratigraphy."

The formal re-opening ceremony on May 9 will be performed by Lord Oxburgh, past president of the Geological Society, and the museum will be open to the public the following day.

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