One of my favourite nature journalists is Richard Bell who wrote some beautiful books in the 1990s including Richard Bell’s Britain, Deep in the Wood, Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle and Walks in Robin Hood’s Yorkshire.

An illustrator and writer who taught landscape and geology at Leeds University, his wonderful illustrations and line notes make for the perfect nature journals.

Yorkshire Rock- a Journey Through Time was first published in 1996 by the British Geological Survey, designed for anyone who enjoys the Yorkshire landscape and for secondary school teachers with material purposely written for tutorials at the time.

At only sixty five pages, Bell managed to pack in five hundred watercolour paintings all designed to explain the history and geology of the area. Taking in Barnsley, Doncaster, York and the Scarborough coast, with a story beginning five hundred million years ago, when Yorkshire lay on the bed of an ocean.

For those of us who know the area, this makes a fascinating read. It’s hard to imagine the city of Leeds as a place of sand dunes where the Zechstein Sea lapped up against the Pennines or where most of the Yorkshire Dales was covered by a shallow tropical lagoon 350 million years ago.

Bell manages to explain the geology of Yorkshire in a fun, easy to digest way. He draws the various rocks and minerals that make up the area beautifully and tells us to look at the rocks for clues as to what Yorkshire looked like before the advent of man: Barnsley: a steamy, tropical forest. Doncaster- a hot, sandy desert, Scarborough- the dinosaurs delta and York- sat in the shadow of a glacier.

This is a lovely, very useful book written and designed by a man who clearly loves his subject. Yorkshire folk are notoriously proud of their heritage and this does them proud.