MARLING 221 



borders of Delaware Forest, but sporadically elsewhere, 

 come some very thin sands, generally light red in 

 colour, sometimes bleached almost white. Much of 

 this land was barren heath up to very recent times, 

 has been reclaimed and made into fertile arable by the 

 marling which was so general a practice down to 

 about the middle of the last century. The Keuper 

 beds of the underlying New Red Sandstone furnished 

 the material, and in many parts of Cheshire every field 

 carries a little pond, the old marl pit, though in a few 

 cases the process was carried out over a large area in a 

 single operation conducted by the landlord. Some of 

 the land would be the better for a renewal of the 

 marling, for the soil is both light and hungry and very 

 lacking in lime ; many of the old grass lands still show 

 a thin layer of the old marl now sunk a foot or so 

 below the surface. In addition to the loams and 

 sands, here and there over the Cheshire plain one 

 meets with areas of black soil passing into peat the 

 " mosses " that represent undrained basins on the 

 surface of the sheet of glacial drift covering the county, 

 where waterlogging and the absence of lime in the soil 

 have combined to produce an accumulation of acid, 

 peaty humus. Many of these mosses have been 

 reclaimed, but a few still are wastes, or carry scrubby 

 plantations of firs and silver birch and other trees 

 tolerant of peaty conditions. We say scrubby ad- 

 visedly, for it must be confessed that trees do not 

 flourish over well in Cheshire. 



It is not merely the soil, it is the atmosphere ; 

 almost from the moment of entering the county one 

 is conscious that the trees look very black in the stem 

 and possess rather small and rusty foliage ; even the 

 hedges, though well enough grown in some respects, 

 have also this indefinable air of malaise. Smoke is 



