"Club members range from complete novices to experienced amateurs, and we all benefit from the help of the local professionals. Monthly evening talks are mostly at Plas Dolerw, Milford Road, Newtown, about half with guest speakers. We try to ensure that most of the talks will appeal to both long-standing and new members.

Monthly field trips take place mostly around Wales and the Borders, often with guest leaders. Our annual long weekend summer field trip has been in recent years to Anglesey, Pembrokeshire, and the Lleyn Peninsula. Not only are the trips interesting from an earth science point of view, often they take us around some stunning landscapes.

The club is affiliated to the Geologists' Association, a national organisation of local and regional societies. Many of our club members also participate in the activities of sister organisations in Wales and the Borders. The club holds a good collection of rocks, fossils and minerals and periodically exhibits these.

If you would like to learn more about the club's activities, come along to a meeting or field trip. Contact the club secretary or look on the web site for the programme

Mid Wales Geology Club made 2007 a special year, with a programme called Land Of My Fathers, designed to tell the public all about our fascinating geological history. Mid Wales after all, has some of the oldest rocks in the whole of England & Wales, which tell a long and complicated story.

The highlight of the programme was a week-long exhibition at the Minerva Arts Centre in Llanidloes. The club prepared some fifty large posters telling the local story, together with over four hundred specimens of local rocks, minerals and fossils. Three models were also made especially for the event.

Around 300 people came to the exhibition and 145 came to the evening talk. Nearly 200 primary school children came to science activity sessions at the exhibition, a programme the local MP described as inspirational. Six other evening talks in Newtown throughout the year told the geological story and the stories of some of the local heroes who worked to understand the regional geology.

The exhibition made a special point of drawing together the regional geology and the metal mining which took place in the southern Cambrian Mountains until the end of the 19th century.

A very special combination of circumstances made the Central Wales Mining District the most important metal mining centre in Britain for a time. The whole programme was a great success and our evening meetings are now even better attended.

We are very grateful to the National Lottery and the Geological Society of London for helping us to mount the programme."