When Nick Branch is on his favourite subject, you half expect him to throw up his arms and deliver, in his full-throated Welsh tenor voice, a rousing chorus of: "Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud! There's nothing quite like it for cooling the blood. So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow, And there let us wallow in glorious mud."
Branch has oodles of the stuff. Bags, buckets, tubes, trays, boxes and sacks of it fill his labs at Royal Holloway, University of London. He sieves it, sorts it, refrigerates it, waters it, dunks it in an array of chemicals, cuts it and, sometimes, just looks at it for hours in its original state. Sand is not really his thing, although he has been known to dabble. A bit boring, he says: not enough in it. Gravel can be a bit more promising. But mud sets his heart pumping. He is a mudlark of a very modern sort. Full article