Cuchlaine King obituary
My former colleague, Cuchlaine King, who has died aged 97, was not only a distinguished geomorphologist with a remarkable research publishing record, but a popular academic author and tutor.
In 1951, Cuchlaine joined the geography department at Nottingham University, becoming professor in 1969. Her interest in geomorphology, the scientific study of landforms and landscapes, included beaches but particularly involved glaciers.
At a time when scientific expeditions to remote locations were often closed to women, in 1953 she (with help from her father) persuaded a Nottingham undergraduate, Jack Ives, to take her as a surveyor on a university expedition to Iceland to study and survey glaciers.
Later in the 1950s she took part in the Cambridge expeditions on the Austerdalsbreen glacier in Norway. In the 60s she worked in Baffin Island, in Canada, again with Ives (by then professor of geography at McGill University, Montreal), who had to persuade the Canadian government to accept a female investigator in the field. Cuchlaine took for granted there was nothing her male colleagues could achieve that she could not, with no sense at the time of blazing a trail for others.
She was born in Cambridge, the younger daughter of Margaret (nee Passingham) and William King, and educated at Francis Holland school in London, and as a boarder at a school in the New Forest. Her father was a distinguished professor of geology at Cambridge University, and Cuchlaine went on to study geography at Cambridge, at Newnham College, graduating in 1943. She specialised in physical geography, learned topographic surveying, with an interest in beach sand movement, and completed a doctorate on the topic in 1949.
Unusually for her generation, Cuchlaine was a prolific and assiduous writer of perceptive thematic geomorphological texts, becoming well known for her Beaches and Coasts (1959), Techniques in Geomorphology (1966) and Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology (1968). She was also an early proponent of “quantitative geography”, the use of numerical and statistical techniques to describe and explain landform development.
In 1961, Cuchlaine was one of only two women in the founding group of academics that became the British Society for Geomorphology. In 1981 she was awarded the Linton prize from the BSG for her contributions to the subject.
After retirement in 1982 she moved to her family home in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire. A commemorative plaque in the local church, St Oswald’s, Askrigg, where Cuchlaine was a bell-ringer from 1988 until 2003, acknowledges her generosity in providing new bell ropes in 2017.
Always unassuming, although with individual grit, scientific integrity and a wry sense of humour, she was inspiring for students at Nottingham and worldwide through her textbooks.
She is survived by a niece, Jane, and three nephews, Nicholas, Timothy and John.
