Concerned with denudation chronology (the reconstruction of long-term landform history), he became involved with study of the origin of tors in Scotland, on Dartmoor, the Pennines and South Africa.
His view was that the British tors were a product of deep chemical weathering under a tropical climate in the Tertiary, exposed by erosion in the Pleistocene.
However his attribution of the prevailing eastward flow of the major rivers of Scotland to emergence and tilted uplift of a fresh chalk seabed in the early Tertiary was dismissed in the PhD studies of French geomorphologist Alain Godard (later Professor at Paris).
[4] At a meeting in Sheffield (with Wooldridge and others) in 1958, he was a founder member of what became the British Geomorphological Research Group,[5] which he chaired in 1961.
Their major work on the development of south-east England has been shown to be based on too simplistic a view of tectonic history.
[6] Among many notable recipients have been Ralph A. Bagnold, Stanley A. Schumm, Richard Chorley, Luna Leopold, Eric H. Brown, Michael J. Kirkby, G.H.
Dury, Cuchlaine A.M. King, Denys Brunsden, M. Gordon Wolman, J.B. Thornes, Ken Gregory, David Sugden and Desmond Walling.