AN ANCIENT LAKE BOTTOM.

New Zealand Times, Volume XLIII, Issue 7280, 24 September 1884, Page 4

AN ANCIENT LAKE BOTTOM.

In a remote comer of the Dartmoor district, just below the twin granite peaks of water-worn Hey Tor, lies one of the strangest and most interesting geological monuments in the whole of England, As one stands on tho brow of the corn-field slopes at Bovey Tracey, ono sees stretched in front a long and narrow plain, bounded on either side by moors that rise into broken clatters or steep bosses of naked trap-rock, and tumbled hero and there into endless petty undulating hillocks, all overgrown with golden gorse and purple reaches of Scotch heather. From any of these rounded hillocks the eye ranges down the valley of a little Dartmoor streamlet towards thebroader basin of tho river Teign at Newton Abbot. The long narrow plain that lies in front is Bovey Hcathficld, a famous place in the historic annals of British geology ; and it takes its name from tho rapid waters 01 the Bovey brook, which flow through it, and from the wild waste of ling and heather by which its surface is everywhere covered. A stranger or quainter nook than tho Heathheld it w ould bo hard indeed to find in this modern workaday England of ours ; it almost seems, when ono look's down upon it from any one of the neighboring heights, as though one had stepped with Alice through tho lookingglass and had got into a topsy-turvy wonderland whoro all tho hills were flattened down into level valleys, and all tho valleys were turned bodily inside out, so as_ to resemble upland moors. Elsewhere in Britain we are accustomed to find tho high plateaus wholly given over to bracken, heath, and furze, while tho river basins smile with the richest tillage, and grow green with meadowland or yellow with ripening corn. Mere, however, at Bovey Heathfield tho ordinary rule is exactly reversed, and wo look down from uplands deep in grass or ■wheat upon a level stretch along tho riverside, not waving with tilth, but all utterly abandoned to the wildest scrub of prickly gorsc and tussocky sedges. This is such a queer contradiction of all familiar experience, that oven the most ungeologioal mind can hardly fail to be struck by its oddity, and coupling it with the singularly level aspect of tho plain as a whole, to risk at least a passing guess at the true reason for so strange a combination of unusual circumstances. It ono digs down a little into one of the small undulating hillocks in tho basin, which just faintly break the general monotony of tho heathery plain, and looks at the nature of tho underlying material, it becomes quite easy to understand why this long stretch of lowland heathfield has never been utilised even by our greedy age for purposes of human cultivation. Tho surface soil is very rough and pebbly, with loose sand sprinkled through it everywhere j while in the taller hillocks, cuttings made in the side show a white clay as the main underlying deposit—a white clay quarried in these very openings to supply the thriving potteries at Bovey Tracey, near tho further end or head of the Heathfield. Nobody who had over visited Poole, or Swanago, or Corfo Castle, could possibly look at this white clay, covered above by heath and gorso, without being immediately reminded of tho very similar wild tertiary country around Wareham and tho islo of Purbeok, whence so much material is yearly shipped from Poolo Harbor to the Staffordehiro potteries. Glancing down onoo more at tho fiat expanse below, with its boundary hills and its whito floor, tho idea at once suggests itself to the merest novice that this must really bo a prehistoric lake bottom. And so in very fact it is—tho dry bed of a mioccno lake, preserving for us to this , day the only existing remains of mioceno ago in all England.—Longman’s Magazine.