202 The Irish Naturalist. [ August, 



We visited first the scene of the outburst— an extensive 

 stretch of undulating bog-land Ij^ing on a range of low hills 

 at an elevation of about 600 feet. The subsided portion of 

 the bog is long and narrow. Its appearance was in every 

 particular similar to that of the Kerry bog, which has been 

 described with some minuteness. There was the same saucer- 

 shaped depression : the same rapid drop around the margin ; 

 the same abundance of " crevasses," parallel near the margin, 

 confused nearer the centre. As in the Kerry bog, there was 

 a flow of the whole mass along the central and lowest line, 

 where in many spots the bog was entirely cleared away, and 

 we walked over blocks of Carboniferous sandstone, and gravel 

 formed of the same material. Although the bog had dried in 

 consequence of the valley formed by the outflow, pools of 

 water still occupied many of the crevasses. A noticeable 

 feature was that the surface of the bog had not settled down 

 to a smooth surface ; the ridges and crevasses, hummocks of 

 old surface and great lumps of old bog that had risen from 

 below to fill the wider cracks, were all still in evidence. An 

 interesting point was that the drainage of the patches of old 

 surface, owing to the network of crevasses, has resulted in an 

 increase in the growth of Ling and diminution of grassy 

 plants, such as Molinia and Eriophoruvi, so that from afar the 

 disturbed area is at once recognisable by its browner colour. 

 On the bare surface left by the opening out of the crust, very 

 little growth has taken place; the Cotton-grass, Eyiophorum 

 a7ig7isfifolium, is pushing its rhizomes through the soft peat 

 here and there, but most of the new surface is still quite bare. 

 We walked down the course of the flow. In the case of the 

 Kerry disaster, the bog burst from the face of a turf-cutting at 

 once into a cultivated valley. Here, on the contrary', the flow 

 followed the sinuous line of a streamlet that meanders through 

 unreclaimed bog. The effect is just as if a gigantic plough had 

 passed down the valley. On each side a ridge of peat, some- 

 times in large masses, sometimes disintegrated, has been left 

 along the high water mark of the flood, while down in the 

 centre the bog has been gouged out in many places to the 

 bed-rock. 



Presently signs of cultivation appeared, and we passed into 

 a valley w^th a rippling stream in the centre, and cultivated 



