66 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



as the ice retreated from the high hills to the coast, con- 

 tinued on into historic times in a reduced state so as to be 

 mapped in 1595 by Thomas Durham, and by Chaloner in 

 1656. A former lakelet is shown also near Castletown 

 draining into the sea at Poyll-vaaish. 



In later post-glacial times this land was covered 

 in great part with forests, particularly of oak, fir, and 

 hazel, the remains of which, off Strandhall and Mount 

 Grawne in the South, may be traced below the present tide- 

 mark, and are of very special interest to us as having 

 possibly been still in existence when Man first made his 

 appearance in our island. For Gumming states* that he 

 had " a celt of the simplest kind, found under the peat on 

 the edge of the curragh near East Nappin. In a meadow 

 adjoining Close Mooar, the property of Professor E. 

 Forbes, were found a short time ago a stone axe and 

 sharpening or edge stone, a few feet asunder. They lay 

 upon a bed of fine sand, covered with a stratum about four 

 feet thick of peat — trunks of oak trees, &c, and over the 

 peat was a bed of blue alluvial clay to the depth of three 

 or four feet." In the same work (p. 139), he mentions 

 it as " singular that an oak tree removed from this sub- 

 merged forest exhibited upon its upper surface the marks 

 of a hatchet " ; and further adds, at second hand, that 

 " the foundations of a primitive hut were laid bare, and 

 that therein were some antique uncouth-looking instru- 

 ments, once the property it may be of the primitive wood- 

 cutters." Again Mr. Jeffcott, High Bailiff of Castletown, 

 recorded! his discovery at Strandhall, where pieces of the 

 antlers of the Irish elk had shortly before been found, of 

 " fragments of human skulls and other human bones " in 

 the debris of a deep excavation in the sea-beach made by 



* The Isle of Man, by J. G. dimming (1848), p. 216, footnote. 

 f Yn Lioar Manninagh, Vol. I., p. 56. 



