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Romance of Plant Life

<h2>CHAPTER XXVIII MOSSES AND MOORS</h2> Peat-mosses and their birds—Moorlands—Cotton-grass—Scotch whisky—Growth of peat-moss—A vegetable pump—Low-lying and moorland mosses—Eruptions and floods of peat—Colonizing by heather and Scotch fir—Peat-mosses as museums—Remains of children and troopers—Irish elk—Story of the plants in Denmark—Rhododendrons and peat—Uses of peat—Reclaiming the mosses near Glasgow. IN Great Britain in this present year one finds exceedingly few places where the influence of man cannot be traced. Over most of the country, indeed, it is impossible to discover a single acre of land where Nature has been allowed to go on working at her own sweet will without interference or restraint. But near Stirling, between the Lake of Monteith and the sea, there is a wide, desolate valley which is probably in exactly the same condition as it was when the Roman legions halted to reconnoitre before Agricola passed onwards to Perth and Aberdeen. Indeed, this great peat-moss has been probably in very much the same condition for some 200,000 years, which is a nice round number to represent the ages that have passed since the Great Ice Age. Now, as then, it is inexpressibly dreary and desolate; everywhere saturated with water, and only to be traversed in dry seasons and with much agility. Even with the 354 greatest care the pedestrian may sink to the waist in a hole of black, slimy, peaty water. Moss, Heather clumps, Sedges, Rushes, and occasionally Cotton-grass, almost at one dead level, stretch right across from the one side of the huge valley to the other. Even grouse are not common. In summer great numbers of gulls lay their eggs upon the moss. This also is one of the few places in Britain where great flocks of wild geese can be heard and seen, but only at a distance. It is almost impossible to get near them, for the upright neck of the sentinel cannot be seen by the stalker as he wriggles towards the flock on his face, until long after the stalker himself has been plainly visible to the bird. Of all useless stretches of barren waste, such a moss as this seems one of the worst. It would, of course, be possible to reclaim it; probably, fertile fields and rich meadows could be formed over the whole valley, but it would not pay nowadays. There is so much good land available in Canada, the United States, and Australia, that this great stretch of our native country will probably remain as useless as it was in Agricola's days. In the Scottish Lowlands and Highlands the moorlands are almost as desolate. At a height of 1500 to 1600 feet in Southern Scotland there is nothing to be seen but the undulating lines of hills, all dark purple with heather or with the peculiar scorched reddish green of Deer's Hair and dried sedges. Perhaps on the nearer hills small streams may have cut a whole series of intersecting ravines in the black peat. They may be six to ten feet deep, and here and there the bleached white stones which underlie them are exposed. Now and then the "kuk-kuk-kuk" of an irate cock grouse, and much 355 too frequently the melancholy squawking of the curlew, irritates the pedestrian as he stumbles over clumps of heather, plunges in and out of the mossy holes, or circumvents impossible peat-haggs. <div></div> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG class="mw" src="images/i_354.jpg" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> An Arctic Alpine Plant This is Draba Alpina from Cape Tscheljuskin, and it is drawn the natural size. The stunted, closely set leaves show the inclement character of the climate. </div> </div> It is indeed a remarkable fact that though these islands support 44,000,000 of inhabitants, including at least 1,000,000 paupers and unemployed, one-seventh of Ireland and many square miles in Scotland are still useless peat-bogs! The Bog of Allen alone covers 238,500 acres, and the peat is twenty-five feet deep. In some few places the peat is still used for fuel, and there is a theory to the effect that peat reek is necessary for the best kinds of Scotch whisky, but neither grouse nor black-faced sheep, which live on the young shoots of the heather, employ in at all a satisfactory way these great stretches of land. Many attempts have been made to spin the silky threads of the Cotton-grass which grows abundantly on the Scotch lowlands. It is neither a grass, nor does it supply cotton, but is called Eriophorum. It is perhaps the one really beautiful plant to be found on them, for its waving heads of fine silky-white hairs are exceedingly pretty. The heather itself gives a splendid red and purple shade, which in summer and autumn is always changing colour, but it is monotonous. Neither the little Bog Asphodel with its yellowish flowers, nor red Drosera, or butter-coloured Butterwort, are particularly beautiful. After seeing such a country one understands something of the Cameronian Covenanters who held their conventicles and took refuge therein. The manner in which these mosses and moors have developed is most interesting, and yet difficult to explain. 356 There are two kinds of peat-mosses, which, although there are many intermediate types, may be kept apart. The first, like the one near Stirling, Lochar and Solway Moss, near Dumfries, and Linwood, near Glasgow, have been formed in low-lying flat estuarine marshes. If one refers back to page 210, it will be seen how reeds and rushes and marsh plants may gradually fill up river backwaters. Eventually a saturated, marshy meadow is produced. Then comes the chance of that wonderful moss the peat-moss, or Sphagnum. It is scarcely possible to appreciate its structure without the help of a microscope and a good deal of trouble in the way of imagination. It is in a small way a sort of vegetable pump which raises water a few inches or so. Stem and leaves and branches possess little cistern cells, which act both as capillary tubes raising the water and also retain it. The stems are upright and develop many branches, so that they become a close-ranked or serried carpet of upright moss-stems squeezed together, which floats on the surface of the water. Each moss-stem is growing upwards and dying off below. In consequence, the bottom gets filled up by dead mossy pieces, which accumulate there, while the live moss-carpet remains floating on the surface of the loathly, black, peaty water. In many peat-mosses the water gets entirely filled up, but that does not stop the formation of the peat-moss. It is now resting on the water-saturated remains of its forefathers, and if water is abundantly supplied it goes on developing. Thus in these lowland or estuarine peat-mosses the moss eventually occupies the water, and goes on growing. After this it develops like the moorland mosses which cover most of the Lowlands and Highlands of Scotland. They cover the 357 hills, and it looks exactly as if some giant had plastered all those hills with a layer of six to ten feet of black peat from 1250 feet upwards. The soil would at first be covered by a saturated moss-carpet of Sphagnum and other mosses. Rainwater falling upon it was all retained, and very little could get away, for the Sphagnum carpet is just like a huge sponge soaking up and retaining the water. But it sometimes happens in these great upland mosses that there are enormous falls of rain which continue for days. Then the water collects under the living moss-carpet and over the dead peat. It may be gathered together in such quantities that the carpet of living peat above it bursts, and a deluge of peaty water overflows the surrounding country, destroying and spoiling everything that it encounters. The worst of these inundations of black mud that has happened in recent years was in December, 1896, near Rathmore, where 200 acres of bog burst and a horrible river of mud overflowed the country for ten miles. Nine people perished, and enormous destruction was caused. There have been many other cases. In 1824 Crowhill Bog, near Keighley, burst; and in 1745, in Lancashire, a space a mile long and half a mile broad was covered by peaty mud. There was also a case in 1697, where forty acres of bog at Charleville burst in the same way.[153] Attempts have often been made to calculate the rate of growth of such peat-mosses. A great many of them began to develop on the mud left by the ice-sheet when the glaciers retreated at the end of the Ice Age. Those mosses are therefore probably 200,000 years old. Some of our Scotch mosses are twenty to twenty-five feet in depth, which 358 gives a foot in 10,000 years. By calculation of the weight of the peat formed, Aigner made out that a certain moss was 20,600 years old, and was growing at the rate of two inches in a century. But in Denmark ten feet has been formed in 250 to 300 years, and in Switzerland three to four feet of peat-moss has been formed in twenty-four years. This shows quite distinctly that there is no regular rate of growth, and indeed it is obvious that much must depend on the climate, on the rainfall, on the drainage, and other circumstances. Sooner or later, however, a limit comes to the growth of the moss. The surface then becomes gently curved: it is highest in the centre, and slopes very gently down in every direction to the edges. What happens next? The first sign is that the surface begins to dry up, and Heather, with grey Cladonia lichens, begins to grow on the projecting tufts and tussocks. Occasionally, if gulls build their nests on such drying-up mosses, patches of bright green grass appear wherever the gulls are in the habit of resting. That is due to the lime in their guano. But under quite natural conditions a much more important and interesting change begins. Here and there scattered over the moss, miserable little seedling Birches and Scotch Firs begin to struggle for life. Of course, if there are hares and rabbits, or if sheep and cattle are allowed to graze upon the moss, those firs have no chance whatever. They are eaten down to the ground. <div></div> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG class="mw" src="images/i_359.jpg" alt="" /> <div class="caption"> Lake Dwellings in Early Britain The Irish elk is the result of the day's sport of these prehistoric Britons, who lived in houses built on piles actually in the water, or in peat mosses. Their only boats were rough dug-out canoes. </div> </div> But if allowed to go on growing they would no doubt cover the whole moss with a wood of Birch and Scotch Fir. In time that wood would by its roots and its formation of 359 fine leaf-mould so radically alter the ground that a forest of Oaks might be possible. It is in fact quite likely that most of our Highland and Scotch hills were at one time covered by fine forests of Scotch Fir, of which the Silva Caledonica spoken of by Tacitus was an example. There is, moreover, evidence to show that this was the case. There is one strange peculiarity of peat which renders it a most useful substance to antiquarians. Anything lost in a peat-moss does not decay away, but remains in a blackened but still recognizable condition for hundreds of years. Not long ago a basket containing the bones of a child was found in a Scotch peat-moss. There is also a story that an English trooper of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and his horse, were discovered in Lochar Moss, near Dumfries. The man's features were traceable at first, but fell into powder when exposed to the air; but the weapons, stirrups, etc., were all perfectly preserved. Bones of the extinct Irish elk have often been found. Not merely so, but the piles of lake dwellings and the rough dug-out canoes which were used by the early inhabitants of Britain have been discovered in a great many places. Coins of Roman, medieval, and modern times have been unearthed, and indeed there is no doubt that if Britain is still inhabited two thousand years hence, boots, sardine tins, brass cartridges, clay pipes, and other characteristic products of our own days, will be disentombed from the peat by enthusiastic antiquarians, and displayed in museums to admiring crowds of our descendants. The reason is quite simple: in peat neither those bacteria which cause ordinary decomposition, nor worms of any kind, are able to exist, so that the material does not decay but 360 accumulates, though it may be blackened by peat, water, and humic acid. It is for this reason that a peat-moss is such a bad or rather an impossible soil. Neither roots nor bacteria can thrive in saturated peat; therefore the flora of a peat-moss is generally confined to the upper surface, where air and bacteria can reach the roots. Peat-mosses are also the home of insectivorous plants, which get their nitrogenous food from the insects which they catch. In consequence of this preserving effect of peat, it is possible to trace the entire history of a peat-moss from the very beginning. Remains of the Dwarf Willow or Polar Birch have been found in England, showing that those now Arctic plants were then flourishing in Norfolk. These are generally in the lowest layers of peat-mosses. Next follow remains of the Birch and Aspen, which would be growing, as they do in places to-day, on mossy soil where the peat was still thin. Higher up in the peat one finds remains of Scotch Fir, showing that at that time regular forests of Scotch Fir existed, e.g. in Sutherlandshire and on Lochar Moss, where they do not grow at present. Some hold that the goats, black cattle, and ponies which have been kept since the Roman occupation at any rate, are responsible for the destruction of these forests. Others hold that they were killed by a change of climate. But they certainly existed. Trunks of Scotch Fir have even been found in peat at 2400 feet in Yorkshire, and at heights in Scotland which are above all the present plantations. About this time it seems that the newer Stone Age men must have been in Switzerland and Denmark, for their remains and characteristic weapons occur in those countries at the same level in the mosses as the Scotch Fir. 361 Still higher in the peat comes the Bog Oak. With it are in Denmark remains of the Bronze, Iron, and Roman times. In Denmark the uppermost layers of the peat contain remains of Beech trees. As this last tree only entered the country in the historic period, it is not found except in the highest layers of all. Unfortunately we have not yet obtained in our own country the same evidence from the peat-bogs as to the history of the flora of Britain. It is at least probable that it was on very much the same lines. Would it be possible to again cover our peat-mosses and moorlands with forests of Conifers, Pines, Larches, and Spruces? There can scarcely be any doubt about it: it would be possible, and according to the best authorities it would even pay to change all land which is not yielding more than 7s. 6d. an acre into forests of Pines. One of the curious facts about peat is that though a peat-moss is one of the worst natural soils, yet broken-up and dried peat is excellent for Rhododendrons, for Orchids in stoves and greenhouses, and a great many other plants. Peat consists of very much the same substances as those that go to form leaf-mould. But the presence of humic and other acids, and the saturation with water and consequently the absence of worms, bacteria, and also of air, make it impossible for plants to grow in a peat-moss. Peat-moss due specially to the Cotton-grass rather than the Sphagnum moss is imported in great quantity from Holland, for use as litter for horses. We have in this country plenty of peat quite good for this purpose, but labour is too expensive for our home-grown peat to compete with the produce of Dutch moors. 362 But that is by no means all the uses to which peat can be put. It is interesting to mention a few of them. 1. Peat is used as fuel. 2. Growing Orchids, etc. 3. Litter for poultry, cattle, and horses. 4. Food for cattle, etc., is made by rubbing the peat into small pieces and saturating with molasses. 5. Paper and a kind of felt can be made of peat. 6. Rugs and carpets can be made of peat-fibre. 7. String and twine. 8. Rough sacks and mats can be made of peat-fibre. Unfortunately, though all these things can be produced out of peat-fibre, it has never paid to manufacture them, and there are very few of the British peat-mosses nowadays where peat is even cut for fuel. It seems much more likely that the end of these peat-mosses will be to become either agricultural land or forest. Near Glasgow a large area of a useless peat-moss has been reclaimed and made to yield excellent crops, by using the refuse of the city. The disposal of such refuse used to be a most troublesome and expensive process, but now it is turned to good effect. It was suggested a few years ago that peat, which is not worth conveyance, should be burnt on the spot, and the energy transmitted by wires. That would be quite impossible, in at least four years out of five, over most of Scotland. 363 <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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