[1] Higginson was born in Thormanby, North Yorkshire, England in 1838 and educated at the Collegiate School, Leicester.
He was apprenticed to Sir William Fairbairn in Manchester for five years, then constructed railways, canals and water works in Russia in 1860–61, in Mauritius from 1862 until 1866, and in England and in India.
His work on the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge earned him the Telford Premium of the (British) Institute of Civil Engineers.
[4] In 1865, whilst working for the Government Staff of the Mauritius Railways, Higginson came upon some workers extracting bones from a swampy morass known as the 'Mare aux Songes'.
He records the moment in his ‘Reminiscences of Life and Travel’[5] “Shortly before the completion of the railway I was walking along the embankment one morning, when I noticed some [workers] removing some peat soil from a small morass.