THE FLORA OF LEICESTERSHIRE 31 
Forest is about 500 ft., so that the hills form but a miniature range. The 
high ground is pierced at short intervals by ragged sharp crags, with 
shallow undulations between, with occasionally steeper slopes or cliffs, as 
at Bardon. Sometimes the rocks are pillar-like as the Hanging Stone 
near Flat Hill, and Charnwood Heath, or at Woodhouse, or the Altar 
stones, Benscliff Wood, etc., where the rocks appear as natural altar 
stones or menhirs. ‘This contrast of rock and bracken, furze, or ling- 
covered slopes or heights is also varied by the large number of small 
tracts of woodland dotted here and there, like the relics of scattered forest- 
land they really represent. ‘There is thus a great diversity of physio- 
gnomic detail which makes Charnwood Forest a fascinating and picturesque 
region of primeval rocks and miniature moors, knoll-covered, with pine, 
larch, and oak, mountainous, diversified, wild. It is, as it were, a rocky 
islet in a sea of grass, the surrounding plains of grassland being flat or little 
undulating, until the great Jurassic escarpment running across Leicester- 
shire north-east by south-west isreached. ‘This runs north-east to Belvoir, 
with a break between Tilton and Burrough, and east of that line is broken 
up and cut into a series of meandering valleys or gorges, with striking, 
flat-topped hills here and there as at Life Hill, Billesdon Coplow (720 ft.), 
Burrough, Robin-a-Tiptoes, Whadborough, etc. This East Leicester- 
shire country is also well wooded in places, and with its great tabular, 
high-level plateaux (700 ft.) and undulating dells or denes cut by the 
rivers Chater, Gwash and Eye, etc., it is a region of great picturesque and 
arresting natural beauty, seen at its best perhaps just over the Rutland 
border at Wardley Hill, Bushy Dales, Deep Dene—all in the Uppingham 
district. 
Some LocaL PLANTs oF EcoNomic INTEREST. 
In every district some local industry or craft may be found to have 
played an important part formerly, if not to-day. Though there is little to 
guide us, doubtless woad-growing and dyeing had its share in the pros- 
perity of the Leicester community, as it did on the Continent from the 
Middle Ages until indigo killed the trade. Blith in 1653 spoke of the 
county as suitable for its cultivation, and the ‘ Records of the Borough of 
Leicester ’ contain fines for infringement of the strict woad regulations 
locally. Flax and hemp were cultivated as part of the native raw produce 
for the manufacture of textiles, for which woad served as a dye substance. 
In certain old terriers, e.g. one of Claybrooke, 1708, these crops were 
rendered also as part of the tithe. Old, dry hollows in the Sheepy district 
and elsewhere, unless marl pits, may have been retting pools where flax 
fibre was prepared by fermentation (there is a flax pool near Castle 
Donington). Hemp occurs here and there as an alien plant, perhaps as 
a relic, in the same way as wood and flax, of former cultivation. 
Many plants figure in the former use of ‘ simples,’ or household herbal 
remedies, and to this cause we may probably attribute the occurrence in 
almost every village of such plants as greater celandine, black horehound, 
marsh mallow, Good King Henry, etc., and less frequently white hore- 
hound, clary, hemlock, vervain, etc. To-day men may be seen to 
go round the county in autumn picking mountain or purging flax by the 
