Bog Oak

A scorcher of a day - 30 degrees.

I have spent most of it inside, but walking from New Bailey to Manchester Town Hall for an important meeting, I felt distinctly over-dressed. And far too hot.

Tiny Tuesday, so this is what a colleague gave me last week. It is a small piece of Bog Oak from Chat Moss. The tree grew 10-12,000 years ago and it's stump is preserved in the peat. It is not oak - "Bog Oak" is a generic term. This is pine or larch. 

At that time what we now know as North-West England would have been a tundra landscape, emerging from the last glacial period. It would have been a bit colder than today ! And the people would have been hunter gatherers using flints and pursuing reindeer and mammoths. Some of their flints occassionally turn up at river-side sites when the archaeologists get to work.