Peat-mosses and their birds—Moorlands—Cotton-grass—Scotch whisky—Growth of peat-moss—A vegetable pump—Low-lying and moorland mosses—Eruptions and floods of peat—Colonizing by heather and Scotch fir—Peat-mosses as museums—Remains of children and troopers—Irish elk—Story of the plants in Denmark—Rhododendrons and peat—Uses of peat—Reclaiming the mosses near Glasgow.

IN Great Britain in this present year one finds exceedingly few places where the influence of man cannot be traced. Over most of the country, indeed, it is impossible to discover a single acre of land where Nature has been allowed to go on working at her own sweet will without interference or restraint.

But near Stirling, between the Lake of Monteith and the sea, there is a wide, desolate valley which is probably in exactly the same condition as it was when the Roman legions halted to reconnoitre before Agricola passed onwards to Perth and Aberdeen.

Indeed, this great peat-moss has been probably in very much the same condition for some 200,000 years, which is a nice round number to represent the ages that have passed since the Great Ice Age.

Now, as then, it is inexpressibly dreary and desolate; everywhere saturated with water, and only to be traversed in dry seasons and with much agility. Even with the greatest care the pedestrian may sink to the waist in a hole of black, slimy, peaty water. Moss, Heather clumps, Sedges, Rushes, and occasionally Cotton-grass, almost at one dead level, stretch right across from the one side of the huge valley to the other.

Even grouse are not common. In summer great numbers of gulls lay their eggs upon the moss. This also is one of the few places in Britain where great flocks of wild geese can be heard and seen, but only at a distance.

It is almost impossible to get near them, for the upright neck of the sentinel cannot be seen by the stalker as he wriggles towards the flock on his face, until long after the stalker himself has been plainly visible to the bird.

Of all useless stretches of barren waste, such a moss as this seems one of the worst. It would, of course, be possible to reclaim it; probably, fertile fields and rich meadows could be formed over the whole valley, but it would not pay nowadays. There is so much good land available in Canada, the United States, and Australia, that this great stretch of our native country will probably remain as useless as it was in Agricola's days.

In the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands the moorlands are almost as desolate. At a height of 1500 to 1600 feet in Southern Scotland there is nothing to be seen but the undulating lines of hills, all dark purple with heather or with the peculiar scorched reddish green of Deer's Hair and dried sedges.

Perhaps on the nearer hills small streams may have cut a whole series of intersecting ravines in the black peat. They may be six to ten feet deep, and here and there the bleached white stones which underlie them are exposed. Now and then the "kuk-kuk-kuk" of an irate cock grouse, and much too frequently the melancholy squawking of the curlew, irritates the pedestrian as he stumbles over clumps of heather, plunges in and out of the mossy holes, or circumvents impossible peat-haggs.

It is indeed a remarkable fact that though these islands support 44,000,000 of inhabitants, including at least 1,000,000 paupers and unemployed, one-seventh of Ireland and many square miles in Scotland are still useless peat-bogs!

The Bog of Allen alone covers 238,500 acres, and the peat is twenty-five feet deep.

In some few places the peat is still used for fuel, and there is a theory to the effect that peat reek is necessary for the best kinds of Scotch whisky, but neither grouse nor black-faced sheep, which live on the young shoots of the heather, employ in at all a satisfactory way these great stretches of land.

Many attempts have been made to spin the silky threads of the Cotton-grass which grows abundantly on the Scotch lowlands. It is neither a grass, nor does it supply cotton, but is called Eriophorum. It is perhaps the one really beautiful plant to be found on them, for its waving heads of fine silky-white hairs are exceedingly pretty.

The heather itself gives a splendid red and purple shade, which in summer and autumn is always changing colour, but it is monotonous. Neither the little Bog Asphodel with its yellowish flowers, nor red Drosera, or butter-coloured Butterwort, are particularly beautiful.

After seeing such a country one understands something of the Cameronian Covenanters who held their conventicles and took refuge therein.

The manner in which these mosses and moors have developed is most interesting, and yet difficult to explain. There are two kinds of peat-mosses, which, although there are many intermediate types, may be kept apart.

The first, like the one near Stirling, Lochar and Solway Moss, near Dumfries, and Linwood, near Glasgow, have been formed in low-lying flat estuarine marshes.

If one refers back to page 210, it will be seen how reeds and rushes and marsh plants may gradually fill up river backwaters. Eventually a saturated, marshy meadow is produced.

Then comes the chance of that wonderful moss the peat-moss, or Sphagnum. It is scarcely possible to appreciate its structure without the help of a microscope and a good deal of trouble in the way of imagination.

It is in a small way a sort of vegetable pump which raises water a few inches or so. Stem and leaves and branches possess little cistern cells, which act both as capillary tubes raising the water and also retain it. The stems are upright and develop many branches, so that they become a close-ranked or serried carpet of upright moss-stems squeezed together, which floats on the surface of the water. Each moss-stem is growing upwards and dying off below. In consequence, the bottom gets filled up by dead mossy pieces, which accumulate there, while the live moss-carpet remains floating on the surface of the loathly, black, peaty water.

In many peat-mosses the water gets entirely filled up, but that does not stop the formation of the peat-moss. It is now resting on the water-saturated remains of its forefathers, and if water is abundantly supplied it goes on developing.

Thus in these lowland or estuarine peat-mosses the moss eventually occupies the water, and goes on growing. After this it develops like the moorland mosses which cover most of the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland. They cover the hills, and it looks exactly as if some giant had plastered all those hills with a layer of six to ten feet of black peat from 1250 feet upwards.

The soil would at first be covered by a saturated moss-carpet of Sphagnum and other mosses. Rainwater falling upon it was all retained, and very little could get away, for the Sphagnum carpet is just like a huge sponge soaking up and retaining the water.

But it sometimes happens in these great upland mosses that there are enormous falls of rain which continue for days. Then the water collects under the living moss-carpet and over the dead peat. It may be gathered together in such quantities that the carpet of living peat above it bursts, and a deluge of peaty water overflows the surrounding country, destroying and spoiling everything that it encounters.

The worst of these inundations of black mud that has happened in recent years was in December, 1896, near Rathmore, where 200 acres of bog burst and a horrible river of mud overflowed the country for ten miles. Nine people perished, and enormous destruction was caused.

There have been many other cases. In 1824 Crowhill Bog, near Keighley, burst; and in 1745, in Lancashire, a space a mile long and half a mile broad was covered by peaty mud. There was also a case in 1697, where forty acres of bog at Charleville burst in the same way.[153]

Attempts have often been made to calculate the rate of growth of such peat-mosses. A great many of them began to develop on the mud left by the ice-sheet when the glaciers retreated at the end of the Ice Age. Those mosses are therefore probably 200,000 years old. Some of our Scotch mosses are twenty to twenty-five feet in depth, which gives a foot in 10,000 years. By calculation of the weight of the peat formed, Aigner made out that a certain moss was 20,600 years old, and was growing at the rate of two inches in a century.

But in Denmark ten feet has been formed in 250 to 300 years, and in Switzerland three to four feet of peat-moss has been formed in twenty-four years.

This shows quite distinctly that there is no regular rate of growth, and indeed it is obvious that much must depend on the climate, on the rainfall, on the drainage, and other circumstances.

Sooner or later, however, a limit comes to the growth of the moss. The surface then becomes gently curved: it is highest in the centre, and slopes very gently down in every direction to the edges.

What happens next? The first sign is that the surface begins to dry up, and Heather, with grey Cladonia lichens, begins to grow on the projecting tufts and tussocks.

Occasionally, if gulls build their nests on such drying-up mosses, patches of bright green grass appear wherever the gulls are in the habit of resting. That is due to the lime in their guano.

But under quite natural conditions a much more important and interesting change begins.

Here and there scattered over the moss, miserable little seedling Birches and Scotch Firs begin to struggle for life. Of course, if there are hares and rabbits, or if sheep and cattle are allowed to graze upon the moss, those firs have no chance whatever. They are eaten down to the ground.

Lake Dwellings in Early Britain

The Irish elk is the result of the day's sport of these prehistoric Britons, who lived in houses built on piles actually in the water, or in peat mosses. Their only boats were rough dug-out canoes.