Charles William Peach

Tennyson would be a regular visitor and convalesced at Victoria cottage during illness He was born at Wansford, then in Northamptonshire; his father at the time was a Yeoman farmer, saddler and harness-maker, and innkeeper, farming about eighty acres (0.32 km2) of land.

James Layton, curate at Catfield, who lent him books and assisted in laying the foundations of accurate knowledge.

About the year 1830, he was transferred to Charmouth in Dorset, thence to Beer, and Paignton in Devon, and to Gorran Haven near Mevagissey in Cornwall.

[2] Here he continued to pursue his zoological studies and supplied many specimens to George Johnston, who was preparing his History of the British Zoophytes (1838).

Posted in 1849 to Scotland, he went first to Peterhead in 1849 where he befriended fellow customs officer and geologist, David Grieve, and went from there to Wick (1853), where he made acquaintance with Robert Dick of Thurso.

He supplied Charles Darwin with cirripede (barnacle) specimens collected on the Cornish coast, and the hulls of oceangoing ships in dry-dock (which it was his duty, as a Customs Officer, to license); thus barnacles from all over the world, these formed the earliest calibration point for Darwin's work on the origin of species.

He moved to Edinburgh in May 1865 whereupon he commenced a new field of research and study into the plant fossils of the Carboniferous rocks of the area.