A sequence of peat and calcareous organic mud from the floodplain of the River Ure near Ripon has yielded pollen, plant macrofossils, Mollusca, Coleoptera, and Ostracoda which allow the first recorded reconstruction of earliest Holocene valley-floor environments for this area. A conventional radiocarbon date on a bulk sample of peat yielded an age of 9710 ± 60 bp. The palaeontological evidence suggests that the sediments accumulated in a shallow, slow moving or stagnant water body, surrounded by marshy, damp, grassland, away from contemporary channel processes, probably of a single thread river system. The climate during deposition of the sediments was no warmer than the present, and possibly slightly colder.

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