John Skinner (archaeologist)

John Skinner (1772–1839) was a parish vicar and amateur antiquarian and archaeologist operating mainly in the area of Bath and the villages of northern Somerset in the early nineteenth century.

He excavated numerous antiquities, especially barrows, such as those at Priddy, Stoney Littleton and the site which later became RAF Charmy Down;[2] and he made visits for antiquarian purposes to many places.

A "tormented and querulous" man in the words of Virginia Woolf, but "at the same time conscientious and able",[14] he came to his living at Camerton to be faced with drunkenness and immorality; with indiscipline and irreligion; with Methodism and Roman Catholicism; with the Reform Bill and the Catholic Emancipation Act, with a mob clamouring for freedom, with the overthrow of all that was decent and established and right.

Virginia Woolf observed, "In fifty years after his death, when the diaries were published, people would know not only that John Skinner was a great antiquary, but that he was a much wronged and suffering man.

[17] His tour of Wales in 1835, when he was 63, now consists of 4 bound volumes[18] comprising descriptive text and nearly 750 sketches, an average of 15 a day, starting with coastal scenes taken when on the packet from Bristol to Swansea, landscapes, castles, abbeys, cromlechs, inscribed stones and towns, Roman roads, but rarely mansions.