FLOODS OF PEAT 



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. Rain-water 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 Crowbill 

 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.^ 



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 

 1 Miall, Nature, Aug., 1898, p. 377. 

 357 



