Early Holocene environments of the River Ure near Ripon, North Yorkshire, UK

A sequence of peat and calcareous organic mud from the floodplain of the Ri ver Ure near Ripen has yielded pollen, plant macrofossils, Mollusca, Coleop tera, and Ostracoda which allow the first recorded reconstruction of earlie st Holocene valley-floor environments for this area. A conventional radioca rbon date on a bulk sample of peat yielded an age of 9710 +/- 60 sp. The pa laeontological evidence suggests that the sediments accumulated in a shallo w, slow moving or stagnant water body, surrounded by marshy, damp, grasslan d, away from contemporary channel processes, probably of a single thread ri ver system. The climate during deposition of the sediments was no warmer th an the present, and possibly slightly colder.