74 
Exmoor Reclamation. 
keep of the many thousand sheep that dwell all the year round 
on the Scotch hills, from the English border to Caithness. 
The wet lands of Exmoor are wet, because, from some in- 
scrutable cause, a thin clay-pan, of from three to six inches thick, 
and quite impervious to water, has been spread by nature like 
a sheet ov er large portions of these hills. Where the pan exists, 
and the water cannot penetrate to the pervious subsoil, the peat 
has grown, covering in the course of centuries hard stones of 
no great size which seem to have been strewn over the surface of 
the pan, and to have belonged to the formation that produced 
it, having no affinity with the killas or clay-slate rocks of which 
the hills are composed. 
The barrows, or ancient burying-places often found on the 
tops of the hills, are formed of heaps of these stones, which were 
no doubt lying on the surface of the ground at the time the 
barrows were made, and have since been covered over by the 
growth of the peat. One may gallop for ten miles over the 
green surface of Exmoor proper, and scarcely see a stone emerg- 
ing from the sod. 
For the greater part of the year these shallow peats are saturated 
with water like a sponge, and form a strong contrast to the dry 
Exmoor land, on which the effect of heavy rain is absorbed 
almost as quickly as on a New Red Sandstone formation. 
Exmoor, although for centuries a Royal Forest, has no trees 
growing on it. Those which, at some remote period, clothed its 
valleys have disappeared long ago. A drainer comes sometimes 
upon a trunk or root ; quantities of hazel-nuts, some eaten by 
squirrels, have been found in the bogs ; and several old charcoal 
pits, in which lumps of charcoal were found as fresh, to all ap- 
pearance, as the day they were burnt, have been cut across. 
This charcoal, it is supposed, was used by the " old men " * to 
smelt the Exmoor iron ores. 
The valleys which lead up to Exmoor are fringed wifh oak 
coppice — part doubtless of the primeval forests of the country. 
Old men, of one generation back, could remember when a 
squirrel could travel along the oak brushwood, which extended 
up the Badgeworthy and Hoaroak valleys, as far as where the 
* Neither antiqiiaries, nor miners, nor tradition can tell us •whether these 
''old men" were Phoenicians, or Romans, or Germans who visited England in the 
time of Henry VIII. The only fact certain is that they worked mines and smelted 
iron ore in tlie whole of the Exmoor district, from near Elworthy Turnpike to 
near the sea at Ilfracombe. This was the spathic or spatliose iron-ore, which 
until the Great Exliibition of 1851 had not been used in England for centuries, 
although without it the best class of steel cannot be manufactured. Tlie mines 
on Exmoor have since been partially explored, and worked sufficiently to show 
that they will be of considerable importance for making steel when tlie means 
of conveyance to the sea have been completed. 
