IT’S a reassuringly rural scene. A herd of cows contentedly chew the cud near the ruins of an old monastery. There are pig pens, a tumbledown house and a group of stoop-backed farm labourers with tools slung over their shoulders.

It could be an illustration from a Thomas Hardy novel. Look closely, however, and you might just recognise it.

The scene is none other than St Mary’s Abbey, with its Gateway and Gateway House, painted in about 1801 by Thomas Rowlandson. Today, the Abbey is still a ruin. But, thanks to the efforts of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, it stands not in open farmland, but in a three-acre precinct that is home to a botanical gardens, an observatory and the Yorkshire Museum.

In their own way, the Museum Gardens are a testament to the dawning age of scientific discovery that began at the start of the 19th century. The discovery of geological strata and fossilised remains brought home for the first time just how old the Earth really was. The belief that God made the world in 4004 BC just didn’t hold up any more.

York was right at the heart of the new age of scientific enlightenment. The discovery of the bones of extinct Ice Age animals in the Kirkdale caves, near Kirkbymoorside, in 1821 led to the establishment of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, a society which, despite its name, was devoted to geology, palaeontology, natural history, astronomy and “antiquities”.

The society wanted to create a geological museum and botanical garden in York, and in the mid-1820s settled on three acres of land in and around St Mary’s Abbey.

“Though close to the Minster and the centre of York, the site required much work before the original pasture land, cowsheds and pigsties could be turned into a garden,” writes David Rubinstein in The Nature Of The World, his new history of the society.

The foundation stone of the new museum, what is now the Yorkshire Museum, was laid on October 24, 1827, and the new building was opened in February 1830. Our main illustration, a lithograph by Frederick Nash dated 1929, shows the foundations for the “new” museum being dug.

The society went on to be at the heart of many of the great scientific debates of the age. It was instrumental in the founding of the British Association For The Advancement of Science at a meeting in York in September 1831, and in 1844 hosted a meeting of that association at which there was a “grand squabble” between clergy and “new geologists”.

The York Observatory, the oldest working observatory in Yorkshire, was built in 1832-3, and between 1835 and 1871 the gardens themselves were stocked with tropical and other plants from all over the world. In the early 20th Century, a new lecture hall, the Tempest Anderson Hall, was built with the help of a generous bequest from the society’s then President, Tempest Anderson.

Today, the museum and gardens are run by the York Museums Trust. There are 2,000 years of unique history here from the Roman Multangular tower to the medieval Abbey and the site’s later importance in the history of science. Without the work of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, however, this unique quarter of York may never have existed in its present form.

• Pictures reproduced from The Nature Of The World: The Yorkshire Philosophical Society 1822-2000 by David Rubinstein. The book is published by Quacks Books, priced £15.95. It is available from Quacks Books at 7 Grape Lane, York YO1 7HU or from the YPS Lodge in Museum Gardens.