As a naturalist he had a great curiosity, observing the geography, geology, plants, animals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish around him and recording what he saw and heard about.

Many of his travels took him to places that were little known to the British public and the travelogues he produced, accompanied by painted and engraved colour plates, were much appreciated.

Each tour started at his home and related in detail the route, the scenery, the habits and activities of the people he met, their customs and superstitions, and the wildlife he saw or heard about.

The Pennants were a family of Welsh gentry from the parish of Whitford, Flintshire, who had built up a modest estate at Bychton by the seventeenth century.

In 1724 Thomas' father, David Pennant, inherited the neighbouring Downing estate from a cousin, considerably augmenting the family's fortune.

At the age of twelve, Pennant later recalled, he had been inspired with a passion for natural history through being presented with Francis Willughby's Ornithology.

[4][5] A visit to Cornwall in 1746–47, where he met the antiquary and naturalist William Borlase,[6] awakened an interest in minerals and fossils which formed his main scientific study during the 1750s.

In 1750, his account of an earthquake at Downing was inserted in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, where there also appeared in 1756 a paper on several coralloid bodies he had collected at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire.

[1] More practically, Pennant used his geological knowledge to open a lead mine, which helped to finance improvements at Downing after he had inherited the estate in 1763.

One of these so impressed Carl Linnaeus, that in 1757, he put Pennant's name forward and he was duly elected a member of the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences.

[6] Observing that naturalists in other European countries were producing volumes describing the animals found in their territories, Pennant started, in 1761, a similar work about Britain, to be called British Zoology.

[11] The observations Pennant recorded in British Zoology were sufficiently detailed and accurate that it was possible to use them to recreate a modern ecological study that had used a decade's worth of laboratory-based molecular data.

Soon afterwards, in February 1765 and apparently as a reaction, he set out on a journey to the continent of Europe, starting in France where he met other naturalists and scientists including the Comte de Buffon,[6] Voltaire, who he described as a "wicked wit", Haller and Pallas, and they continued to correspond to their mutual advantage.

The intention was that Pallas would write the book but, having written an outline of what he planned, he got called away by the Empress Catherine the Great to her court at St Petersburg.

[15] While work on the Synopsis of Quadrupeds was still in progress, Pennant decided on a journey to Scotland, a relatively unexplored country and not previously visited by a naturalist.

[16] On his return home, Pennant wrote an account of his tour in Scotland which met with some acclaim and which may have been responsible for an increase in the number of English people visiting the country.

In this they were thwarted and had to retrace their route, having met bogs, hazardous rocks and country that even their "shoeless little steeds" had difficulty in negotiating.

These works include so much detail of the countryside, its economy, natural history and the customs of the inhabitants that they are still of interest today by way of comparison with the very different state of things now.

Teach the sweet coquette to know Heart of ice in breast of snow; In 1790 he published his Account of London, which went through a large number of editions.

It was written in the style of his previous works and contained information on things of historical interest in the parts of the capital to which his wanderings led him.

Volumes three and four included the parts of India east of the Ganges, Malaysia, Japan and China but before these were published he suffered a gradual decline in health and vigour and died at Downing, in December 1798.

These two volumes were edited and published posthumously by his son, David, as were also several other short papers and an autobiographical work, The literary life of the late Thomas Pennant, Esq.

"[40] The Gentleman's Magazine of 1797 reviewed The History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell, commenting on his claim ("Resurgam", Latin for 'I shall rise') to have returned from the dead (having announced the end of his literary life back in 1791), and continuing to joke about his excesses throughout.

For example, the review remarks that the portrait of "the late Pretender" to the throne "at a certain time, might have cost its possessor [Pennant] his seat on the bench of justices".

[41] After Pennant's death, the French zoologist and naturalist Georges Cuvier wrote of him "When the life of a man is entirely devoted to the sciences, it cannot be expected that it will present a variety of incident; it will be found most truly in the analysis of his works.

Pennant says, they inhabit and breed in the fens near Spalding, in Lincolnshire, and that the female makes a nest not unlike that of the Crested Grebe, and lays four or five white eggs.

"[45] On occasion, Pennant's knowledge could be highly specific: for "The Great-Crested Grebe", Bewick records that the nest "is made of various kinds of dried fibres, stalks and leaves of water plants, and (Pennant says) of the roots of bugbane, stalks of water-lily, pond-weed and water-violet; when it happens to be blown from among the reeds, it floats about upon the surface of the water".

[47] Mabey however comments that he "had no great aptitude or instinct for field-work and nothing approaching [Gilbert] White's critical intelligence",[47] arguing that Pennant "was essentially an intellectual entrepreneur, a popularizer and compiler of other people's observations and ideas, and was able to produce a large number of very readable guides as a result.

"[47] Mabey adds that Pennant had a "pushy and bombastic manner, and a reliance on second-hand information that at times came close to plagiarism"[47] but admits that he was an innovative author of books, in particular by seeking original reports "from a wide network of field observers",[47] meeting the fashion in the 1760s for natural history journalism.

[47] Pennant's exploration of the Western Isles of Scotland was revisited by Nicholas Crane in a television documentary programme first broadcast on BBC Two on 16 August 2007, as part of the "Great British Journeys" series.