igoo.J CoiyGAN. — Botany of Galway and Mayo Highla7ids. 1 13 



with the hills wrapped in cloud, so that we had to postpone a 

 contemplated ascent of Ben Baun, or the White Mountain 

 (2,395 feet), the highest point of the Bens, until Friday, the 

 14th, This was a perfect day, and taking Joyce's car for some 

 six miles up Glen Inagh, we attacked the mountain by the 

 long spur running north-east from the summit. The end of 

 this spur is marked by a point reaching to 1,362 feet, named 

 Knockpashemore on the Ordnance map, and here on cliffs 

 facing north at about 1,300 feet we found Sedtim Rhodiola in 

 a new station for the Twelve Bens. At 1,200 feet a few plants 

 of Lastrea csnmla were observed, and on and near the summit 

 Thrift appeared in fine bosses interspersed, as on Ben Corr, 

 with sheets of Sea Campion. From the top of Ben Baun, well 

 named from the light-coloured screes seaming its upper slopes, 

 an impressive wilderness of stony peaks and deep-cut glens 

 opens out, a dismal prospect to the botanist;, but not without 

 stimulus to the lover of unadorned solitude. There is just 

 one point in the near prospect on which the eye of the botanist 

 can linger with pleasure, the great truncated cone or gable- 

 end of Muckanaght, a mile distant towards the west, its 

 verdant slopes standing out in marked contrast to the sur- 

 rounding desert of grey stone. This oasis of schist in a 

 Sahara of quartz is the "crowning mercy" of Mr. Hart's 

 indefatigable labours of seventeen years ago, and no other 

 point in the Bens, least of all Ben Baun, can compare with it 

 in the richness of its alpine flora. 



We came down south-east into the head of Glen Inagh 

 where the Glen Inagh river takes its rise under the grand 

 rock-face of Bencailliaghduff For austere beauty this thousand 

 feet of precipitous crags is perhaps unsurpassed in the whole 

 group of the Twelve Bens, and as a training-ground for 

 moderately ambitious climbers it seems well worthy of atten- 

 tion. The deep-cut channel of the infant Glen Inagh river 

 gave us abundance of finely developed Crepis paludosa, and at 

 a height of about 800 feet appeared a most remarkable variety 

 or form of Saxifraga stcllaris, somewhat approaching to the 

 arctic var. comosa of Poiret, synonymous with 6*. foliolosa of 

 Robert Brown. At first sight the Glen Inagh plant, which 

 grows in considerable quantity recumbent on moss-clad stones 

 in the bed of the main stream and of a tributary rill, appears 



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