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Updated: May 27, 2025
It is too steep for turf; it is grey with marl, and patchy where scree of flint and chalk has run and found a lodgment. Ice-worn it may be, man-wrought it is not. No red-deer picks have been at work there, no bright-eyed, scrambling hordes have toiled their shifts or left traces through the centuries as at the Devil's Dyke. This noble arena is Nature's. Here I saw her people more than once.
The plain upon which we look down was once the floor of an extensive lake, for it is composed of various strata of sand, clay, marl, and limestone, containing various genera and species of fresh-water shells.
The carvings consisted of the horn handle of a dagger, cut into the shape of a reindeer, and other forms. That these relics belong to a far distant age is proved by the strongest evidence. It must suffice here to give some of the more striking of these proofs of antiquity. The flint hatchets found at St. Acheul, France, were obtained from a gravel bed which lay below twelve feet of sand and marl.
Rich lowlands and oolites suit the cereals; red marl produces wonderful grazing grass; bare uplands are best for gorse and heather. Hence everything favours for the practical man the mistaken idea that plants and trees grow mainly out of the soil.
The sheep are there, but no longer lean; no more the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous farms backed by thrifty groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the dooryards, heaps of gray marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water singing the doom of the heath in the sand; for where it comes the heather moves out. A resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully forward. Not all of the heath is conquered yet.
The range of lofty marl hills, over which the sun rises for Ghât, is still seen stretching northwards and southwards. Animals feed about here and there; some quails whirr along the ground; black vultures, white eagles, and numerous crows, perch upon the rocks, or speckle the sky overhead. I went to visit the "Water," as they call a small lake that nestles amidst the rocks.
In the interior, and especially in the valleys of the Rocky Mountains, the soil is generally blackish, though sometimes yellow. It is frequently mixed with marl, and with marine substances in a state of decomposition. This kind of soil extends to a considerable depth, as may be perceived in the deep cuts made by ravines, and by the beds of rivers.
Above this we have small quantities of calcareous marl. As we were now in the district of Chicova, I examined the geological structure of the country with interest, because here, it has been stated, there once existed silver mines. The general rock is the gray soft sandstone I have mentioned, but at the rivulet Bangue we come upon a dike of basalt six yards wide, running north and south.
Andrew Hay, you being upon your departure towards France and Italy by my noble Lord's order, I give you this commission, not now expecting that you can execute every part of it in this journey, but yet hoping that you will dispatch those articles which are of the greatest importance, and put the others into a proper posture against the time of your next return thither. *Marl. MS., Harl.
In the year 1837, a short paper was read by me before the Geological Society of London, "On the Formation of Mould," in which it was shown that small fragments of burnt marl, cinders, &c., which had been thickly strewed over the surface of several meadows, were found after a few years lying at the depth of some inches beneath the turf, but still forming a layer.
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