Cirques. 429 



valleys of the Cuchullin Hills. I could give special 

 instances in some of those regions, but they would add 

 little to the effect of what I have stated, and would 

 needlessly lengthen this book. 



Again, when the glaciers were retiring westward, up 

 the dales of Yorkshire and Northumberland, the ice left, 

 as it retreated, heaps of debris originally forming irre- 

 gular mounds, often enclosing cup-shaped hollows ; but 

 these, which sometimes still remain in the more recent 

 smaller moraines, have in the more ancient and larger 

 ones often got filled up by help of rain washing the fine 

 detritus into them ; and the whole has become so smooth 

 that the original moundiness has, by degrees, been 

 nearly obliterated. In like manner the same has taken 

 place in the wide valley that crosses England eastward 

 from the bend of the river Lune, near Lancaster, by 

 Settle to Skipton, including most of the country between 

 Clitheroe in Lancashire and Skipton, and as far south 

 as Pendle Hill and the other hills that border the Lanca- 

 shire Coal-field on the north. And this is what we 

 find : The great glacier sheets that came down the 

 valley of the Lune from the Cumbrian mountains and 

 Howgill Fells, and from the high hills of which Ingle- 

 borough and Penny gent form prominent features, spread 

 across the whole country to the south, and fairly over- 

 flowed the range of Pendle Hill into the region now 

 known as the Lancashire Coal-field, and far beyond. The 

 result was that the whole of the country between Clitheroe 

 and Skipton, including the country south of Clapham 

 and Settle, was rounded and smoothed into a series of 

 great roches moutonnees, partly formed of Carboniferous 

 Limestone; and as the final glaciers retired, through 

 gradual change of climate, these became covered with 

 mounds of moraine-matter, now not easy, at first sight, 



