John MacEnery

Who was John MacEnery?

Father John MacEnery was a Roman Catholic priest from Limerick, Ireland and early archaeologist who came to Devon as Chaplain to the Cary family at Torre Abbey in 1822. In 1825, 1826 and 1829, he investigated the prehistoric remains at Kent's Cavern in Devon, having been shown the cave by Thomas Northmore.

MacEnery concluded that the palaeolithic flint tools he found in the same contexts as the bones of extinct prehistoric mammals meant that early humans and the creatures such as mammoths co-existed.

His contemporaries had great difficulty reconciling his findings to their pre-Darwinian, creationist view of the earth's history. MacEnery left Torquay and his cave research in 1830. He never published and it was left to William Pengelly to publicise and explore his findings in 1859, years after MacEnery's death at age 43.