20 LANDSCAPE IN HISTORY 



them have no doubt been artificially drained. Their 

 sites are still preserved in such Saxon names as Bog- 

 side, Bogend, Mossflats ; and where other human record 

 is gone, the black peaty soil remains to mark where 

 they once lay. It would not be impossible with the 

 help of such pieces of evidence and a study of the 

 present contours of the ground to map out in many 

 districts, now well drained and cultivated, the swamps 

 that hemmed in the progress of our ancestors. 



No one looking at the present maps of the north 

 of England and Scotland would be led to suspect what 

 a large number of lakes must have been scattered over 

 the surface of these northern regions when the Romans 

 set foot in the country. Yet if he turns to old maps, 

 such as those of Timothy Pont, published some three 

 hundred years ago, he will notice many sheets of water 

 represented there which are now much reduced in size 

 or entirely replaced by cultivated fields. If, farther, 

 he scans the topographical names of the different 

 counties, he will be able to detect the sites of other 

 and sometimes still older lakes; while, if he sets to 

 work upon the geological evidence by actual examina- 

 tion of the ground itself, he will be astonished to find 

 how abundant at comparatively recent times were the 

 tarns and lakes of which little or no human record 

 may have survived, and often how much larger were 

 once the areas of lakes that still exist. Owing to some 

 peculiar geological operations that characterised the 

 passage of the Ice-Age in the northern hemisphere, 

 the land from which the snow-fields and glaciers re- 

 treated was left abundantly dotted over with lakes. 

 The diminution and disappearance of these sheets of 



