LANARKSHIRE RAMBLES. 



By Robert Turner. 



Clydesdale is a country of surprises for the naturalist. Along 

 with its populousness there are ample solitudes of moorland and 

 hill where wildness is all in all. Peesweep, snipe, and whaup 

 haunt this land of heather and bog-moss, and yet we can often 

 pleasantly sniff humanity afar in the peat-reek perfume borne over 

 miles of moor. Even round its great city there are quiet retreats 

 where nature unfolds itself, and here and there amid industrial 

 unloveliness sudden byeways open into green seclusions. Its 

 blackest country is full of possibilities to those who study its rock 

 records, whose enthusiasm flames over marvellous past creatures, 

 who delight in stone forests and the mysteries of an antiquity 

 beyond the measures of our clocks and chronologies. 



Much of Upper Clydesdale is moorland, trending down from 

 " God's Treasure House in Scotland " at Leadhills in rounded 

 undulations, heather and grass clad, of Silurian and Old Red 

 Sandstone strata to the Falls. The flora of the uplands here is 

 very similar to that of the high country fringing the valley further 

 down ; but as the excursions of the Society have so far been 

 restricted in that direction by the Falls, it is proper that this paper 

 should not intrude on what is to the Society an unknown land. 



To refer first to the uplands along the valley, which are mostly 

 moorland and marsh, the chief feature there in the vegetation is 

 the ling-heather {Calluna vulgaris), with which miles of moor are 

 aflush in autumn. With it is associated the fine-leaved heath 

 {Erica cinerea) and the less frequent cross-leaved one {Erica 

 Tetralix), popularly known as bell-heather. Other very character- 

 istic plants are rushes of various kinds {Juncus, etc.) and sedges 

 {Carex), and not the least conspicuous of this kind of vegetation 

 are the two species of cotton-grass {Eriophoruvi) with white 



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