218 COLIN CLOUT'S CALENDAR. 



mountain sibbaldia, which forms the main element in 

 the greensward of the Perthshire moors, or again as with 

 the Alpine hawkweed and the common crowbeny, which 

 grow abundantly as far southward as the Merioneth 

 cairns. But a more interesting class of glacial stragglers 

 are those which now loiter only on one or two solitary 

 mountain-tops in Britain, and do not again appear until 

 we reach the higher Swiss pastures or the frost-bound 

 arctic plains. For example, there is a beautiful little 

 pink campion, the Alpine lychnis, which grows abun- 

 dantly only in high latitudes on the Scandinavian coasts, 

 or at great elevations among the Bernese Oberland ; but 

 which nevertheless manages still to hold its own in two 

 isolated patches in Britain one on the summit of Little 

 Kilrannock, a Forfarshire mountain, and the other on 

 Hobcartin Fell in the English lake district. Our own 

 country has long been so thoroughly explored by col- 

 lectors that almost every separate station for each rare 

 flower has been familiarly known for two or three gene- 

 rations : and thus it is quite possible to make a complete 

 list of such isolated glacial survivals, perched like the 

 European settlers from the ' Bounty ' in Pitcairn's Island, 

 each on its own domain of a few acres and separated by 

 hundreds or thousands of miles from its nearest con- 

 geners in the arctic regions. A complete catalogue 

 would occupy many pages of a big book ; but two or 

 three of the more striking examples may be roughly 

 thrown together in a few words. 



A little boggy sandwort, now dying out even in the 

 marshes of arctic Europe, drags on a lonely existence 

 in Britain only among the upland peat of Widdybank 

 Fell in Durham. Another arctic sandwort of mountain 



