Earthwords – words about the Earth! Earthwords for innovative interpretation!

I’m John Macadam and I am a geologist and interpreter (originally trained in 1999 by the US National Parks Service, on a Royal Society Millennium Award). This post was updated in June 2023 and while I sort out the problems with this website you can still download some of the material I have produced for the public: it’s listed on the University of Exeter server (I used to lecture there – and am now just an ‘Associate’). But you can download directly a leaflet on Bodmin Beacon Local Nature Reserve, plus a 24 page booklet on Bodmin Moor in English, French, Spanish, German and Dutch.

More academic stuff can be found on Researchgate and Academia.eu (though I have not written much academic material) – you can request a chapter I wrote in 2018 on geoheritage interpretation (it’s in Reynard & Brilha’s Geoheritage). If you want to watch a 32 minute video about geoheritage interpretation I gave a keynote at the Norwegian Geological Survey’s Annual Seminar in 2015 it’s on their YouTube channel. None of my subsequent (or previous) talks have been recorded…and I had a few problems with the technology in Norway: Geoheritage: what do we want to tell them?

I even write general guidebooks for walking trails. National Trail Guide 9: South West Coast Path – Padstow to Falmouth gets updated every few years – the most recent edition was in 2018, so it needs updating! You can find my ‘Recreational Path Guide’ book for The Two Moors Way second-hand: it was not a commercial success (not enough walkers!) – a pity as it got excellent reviews. These books include 1:25k Ordnance Survey maps.

Apologies for the continuing problems – I hope my website will be back up – like it was before!…that’s before repeated software conflicts crashed it – with lots of stuff to look at and download. And you’ll not need to look at a long index of files with strange names! “BEQ…..” = Brown End Quarry in Staffordshire; “booklet” = 24 page booklet, in several languages, for Bodmin Moor, “RocheRock” and “Tresayes” are linked by a trail…..

And if you are looking for material about the Macadam/MacAdam/McAdam/M’Adam family, or Macadamia nuts or macadam roads then there’s a page of my old website archived on the Wayback Machine. Other people have written articles for Wikipedia on several members of the family – e.g. John Macadam, William Macadam, Stevenson Macadam, William Ivison Macadam, Ivison Macadam and my aunt, the artist, Margaret Macadam. My mother, the artist (and a war artist in India), Amy Elton, joined the family by marrying my father….the result was a ‘Victory baby’ (me).