Rankin : The Peat-Moors of Lonsdale. 159 



areas are peat-covered, and the broad hill sides are pasture 

 grown, on the southern watersheds ridges and flanks alike are 

 submerged beneath sodden moors, which reach down almost to 

 the farmsteads. The heavy glaciation of the whole district, 

 which at its maximum engulphed all except the topmost 

 peaks in ice. has left many signs on the highlands. Drumlins 

 have ponded back drainage as shallow tarns, which tilling, 

 first with sedges, rushes and grasses belonging to the swamp, 

 finally passed into heath-moors. Swathes of more or less 

 impervious ground moraine plastered over easily pervious 

 limestones, as on Ingleborough, have brought up the associa- 

 tions of the wet grasslands in the midst of those of the drier type. 



The two groups of associations constituting the wet Grass- 

 lands, those of the swamp moor formation and those of the 

 heath moor, so evident in the lowlands, are scarcely less 

 distinguishable on the uplands. 



The swamp moors, it may be recalled, are characteristic of 

 the infilling pools, or other badly drained spots fed by water 

 more or less immediately telluric in origin. The heath moors, 

 on the contrary, have the atmospheric precipitation as the chief 

 water supply. 



•On the uplands, swamp moors of rushes and Molinia, with a 

 small florula of dicotyledons are seen about shallow tarns fed 

 by small streams draining some limited watershed, but inore 

 particularly about the issues of springs, and the early courses 

 of streams. In places, such miry spots are regularly cut for 

 litter;, the moor-grass, Molinia, and the rushes, no less than 

 the bracken, Pteris, of drier spots, yielding useful bedding 

 harvest. 



Molinia meadows are in a few places seen to encroach upon, 

 and in the late .phases of succession to engulph, birch scrub 

 growing upon damp, clayey soil. 



As with the Molinia marshes of the lake margins of the 

 lowlands, so on the uplands, they show the intrusion of the heath 

 in the plants of ling, Calhina, heaths. Erica sp. cotton- 

 secig^e,,^ Eriophorum vaginatum and bog-moss Sphagnum sp., 

 being in the course of time, as seen by the present zonation 

 bey.on:d, fated to pass wholly into the heath-moor. 



All totalled, these swamp moors and transition moors of 

 Lonsdale make but a poor show in comparison with the great 

 Erv^phorum moors. Moors of Sphagnum, of Scirpus coes- 

 pitosus and of Racomitrinm. occur but rarel3% and then are of 



igib A'i)). I. 



