Transactions of the Manchester Geological Society Volume 20 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 Excerpt: ...in the Ribble Valley, at the time when these ancient canoes were probablv used by contemporaneous man for either traversing the stream or for fishing purposes. Remarkably fine and numerous specimens of the skull and antlers of the red deer, Cerrus elap/ius, have been also obtained from the 3ame deposits, and now adorn the walls of the Preston Museum. These, perhaps, do not plead for so great an antiquity of these Ribble deposits as the Bos primigenius, seeing that the red deer still exist in a wild or semi-wild state in the forests of Scotland. Other rivers and inland waters of the British Isles have yielded from time to time examples of the skill of our ancient boat builders, but perhaps none can compare with the river Clyde and its estuary for the number and importance of its illustrations of these ancient types of naval architecture. Some 15 to 20 having been exhumed in different portions of the river and estuary during the present century. The largest of these Clyde canoes was probably one discovered in 1854, at Erskine Ferry, 10 miles below Glasgow. It was hollowed out of a single oak, and measured 29ft. in length, the stern was an open one, and had grooves for the fixing of a vertical board, like the one found at Preston. An account of these ancient canoes was compiled by Mr. John Buchanan, and read at the meeting of the British Association at Glasgow in 1855, and therefore I need not further allude to them here, except to mention that an immense antiquity was claimed for them, owing to the position in which some of them were found, viz-, beneath the streets of the city of Glasgow itself, while digging the foundations of various buildings, thus showing a great change in the relative level of the land and sea, since the period when they were buried ben...