Geology and Agriculture 129 



place since. Scrubbed and weathered stones crop out 

 everywhere, and in every dingle we must scramble pain- 

 fully over piles of dtbris y with which the half-buried cliff is 

 gradually completing the process of self-interment in its 

 own ruin. Some of these heaps of stones afford admirable 

 summer nurseries to Stoats, which are fairly numerous in 

 spite of constant trapping, but the soil about them is mostly 

 too thin to offer much attraction to rabbits. Most of the 

 sides of the hills are covered with grass, scanty but sweet 

 amongst the rocks and where the soil is dry, sometimes 

 coarse and rushy where some dip in the ground retains the 

 wet. In winter, however, the sheep, and cattle, eat up much 

 of the rushes, wherever they can get at them, and crop 

 closely the tufts of even such rank food as Aira Ctespitosa, 

 which is seldom relished elsewhere. The flatter uplands 

 are chiefly covered with peat, and clothed with heather, but 

 on the sides of many depressions in which rock has accumu- 

 lated, the disintegration of the hard stone may be traced. 

 Where rills intersect it, the peat has been broken up, and is 

 being steadily carried away, and where it is intermixed with 

 the crumbled stone, we see in progress the gradual formation 

 of a richer soil. In the course of the rill, the older herbage 

 is being supplanted by Sheep's Fescue, and Poa anuua^ the 

 seeds of which may, originally, have found their way thither 

 in the wool of the sheep, whose descendants now eagerly 

 seek out the sweet grass, while their scattered droppings are 

 constantly aiding still further to increase the fertility. 



Several of the larger mounds on these hills are crowned 

 by artificially raised cairns of stone, and in one of them I was 

 astonished to find an excellently preserved Quern. Such 

 vestiges of the early Britons are, of course, not infrequent 

 in the valleys, but how an implement for the grinding of 

 grain should have found its way up here, it is not easy to 

 conjecture. On the low ground, I noticed Querns built 

 into the dry-stone walls in several places, and here and 

 there they are to be seen as ornaments at a cottage door, or 

 in more pretentious gardens. Perhaps it may have been 

 the custom for moving tribes to carry a mill about with 

 them, and the stone on the hill may have been accidentally 



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