2l6 



THE BRITISH NATURALIST. 



[September 



GEOLOGICAL NOTES OE THE SCENERY OF THE 



KILLARNEY DISTRICT. 



BY CHARLES WHITE. 



{Continued from page 190.) 



Sometimes these patches of drift assume the appearance of shelves or 

 raised beaches, but these are scored and gashed by the watercourses 

 which though generally dry in summer yet in the season of heavy 

 rain carry off a large volume of hill-side drainage. Nearer the base 

 much of the sand has been washed away, and the commons and the 

 fields are left as full of great stones as a churchyard in a thickly- 

 populated district. 



Much of the surface of the drift is uncultivated, but in places a 

 farmhouse and patches of potatoes and meadow vary the prevalence 

 of gorse and heather. Too often it is painful to watch how 

 much patient labour is wasted on an ungrateful soil. The most plenti- 

 ful crop is that of stones, which are heaped up sometimes in the centres 

 of the fields, and sometimes at the edges, and sometimes are built up 

 into partition walls. In one damp hollow where the drainage was left 

 to nature I saw the Osmunda flourishing in great luxuriance. The 

 best use that the drift could be put to would be to plant it, as has been 

 done on one side, with different species of fir, which seem to take very 

 kindly to the barren earth, and in these days of demand for telegraph 

 poles the practice promises to be remunerative. 



Not much suggestion of beauty attaches to the drift, and the 

 prospect is one of general bareness and poverty, except when relieved 

 by masses of yellow of the flowering gorse ; and, dry as the hillside 

 appears in the summer, the occasional stepping stones by the pathside 

 indicate that the rills which you now see may on occasions flush up 

 into rivulets and even rivers. Here and there may be seen round pits, 

 about 6oft. across at the brim, and 20ft. deep, which may be taken to 

 be occasioned by the subsidence of the drift into caverns made in the 

 underlying limestone by running water, very much in the way that is 

 sometimes experienced so disagreeably in the town of Northwich. 



That the set of the currents of the glacial sea was southwards and 

 diverted S.-W. is indicated by the fact that this bed of drift and other 

 similar ones are only found on the north side of the mountain ridge. 

 Whether this sea was ice-covered is not a matter of much importance— 

 probably it was — but as the blocks of Old Red -are of local origin, we 

 need not trouble ourselves about ice-borne boulders. 



The absence of the drift from Tore westward to the Gap of Dunloe \ 

 opens out many points of interest, both with reference to the scenery as 

 well as to the causes of that absence. The same sea must have dashed j 



