other means perched on the hill sides: and such as are of white quartz have been used to mark boundary lines, or are often placed round ancient interments as already instanced. On Maughold Head, at about 300 feet of elevation, lies a large "erratic block” of greenstone, strongly marked with grooved and crossed lines, Above, and filling up the ploughed surface of the earlier accumulations, are horizontal deposits of sand, peat, and marine shells, the latter such as now live in the sea close at hand, but deposited higher than its waves can now reach. On this north-western part of the island, the coast is of a nature to disintegrate, the wind redistributing the sand into "broughs" or hills, imperfectly kept together by the growth of lyme-grass and mat-weed; at the extreme north—the Point of Ayre—the sands, probably thrown on shore by currents, are drifted by the same agency into parallel undulations or ridges, much like the waves of the sea—a truly barren waste, adorned with little but gorse, a plant, however, here not wholly despised, but chopped in windmills for fodder. North of Peel there is a narrow tract of old red sandstone forming the sea-cliffs, and of it the venerable cathedral of St. Germain is in part built; it is there strangely pitted and honeycombed, apparently by the action of the winds. The fragments of shells seen in the hardened sands in this part of the island are perhaps due to wind-drifts. It is in what we may term "Forbes's Parish" that the remains of the great deer or elk (Megaceros) principally occur, entombed below the peat of the curragh, and reposing on a bed of shell-marl] of fresh-water formation, not much more than twenty fees above the sea level. These curraghs must be partly of recent and partly of pleistocene formation—to use Forbes's term; the latter, because when the elk lived here, its range could not have been so limited as it must have been if the isle were as we see it now.[1]
The enrraghs are of interest in other respects, especially to the botanist. The Osmunda is the common fern. Willows, such as Salix pentandra, &c., S. fusca, and its many varieties, the sweetgale, the bog-bean, the marsh cinquefoil, milfoil, and several other rarer plants, also occur in them. Pulegium vulgare is common in wet clay, and on the dry, sandy road I found Silene Anglica, Papaver Argemone. several species of rose and sweetbriar, with, however, but one Rubus (friticosus.) On a dry bank, near Jurby, was a remarkable potentilla, (P. Hirta,) scarcely indigenous, though found also near Perth. How the plant got here it is difficult to conceive.
The landscape is somewhat drear, the church towers the most conspicuous objects. Little streams, originating in the marshes, with difficulty find their way to the sea, and enter it, like the Callaue, between the sand hills, forming little coves, interesting from the numerous marine plants growing about.[2] It was in these streams and in the curragh that Forbes fished for Limnei and Planorbes.
- ↑ In a specimen obtained by the writer. but broken below the snags, the measurement from the centre of the forehead to the extreme end of the right horn would be, in a direct line, 4ft. 6in.
- ↑ Avenaria peploides, Pyrethrum maritimum, Cerastium tetvandrum, Eryngium, Glaucium, Beta maritima, Astiplex laciniata, Triticum toliaceum. No plants or shells are recorded, except such as the writer noticed, unless otherwise notified.
