Giraldus Cambrensis, more than his contemporaries, had an eye for local topography. In spite of his taste for the marvelous, this impelled him now and then to paint a fairly clear word picture of the appearance of the countryside. He notes many things of a sort that do not usually occur in other medieval works; for instance, the fact that in fair weather it is possible to see the hills of Ireland from St. David’s Head in Wales;[1090] that the fertility of the Irish soil lies in its grassland rather than in its grain;[1091] that Ireland is rugged and hilly, very damp and watery, full of woods, swamps, and trackless wastes, with lakes at the foot of the hills and pools and bogs even on the highest summits; that here and there one sees beautiful plains, but in general open surfaces are of limited extent in comparison to woodland; that the seacoasts are low, that hills and mountains are restricted to the interior, and that both inland and along the shores there is more sandy than rocky country.[1092] He was also impressed by the barren and desolate character of many parts of Wales;[1093] the “angle” of the land near St. David’s, he says, has a rocky, sterile soil, with neither woods, nor rivers, nor orchards, but is open and exposed to winds and storms. Mona also is arid and rocky, deformed in appearance, and generally unpromising, though as a matter of fact vastly more fertile and opulent than the adjacent portion of the Welsh mainland.[1094] CHAPTER X THE ASTRONOMICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE KNOWN WORLD We have already examined the broader theories of astronomical geography whereby the relation of the globe to the remainder of the universe was explained. In this chapter we shall speak only of those aspects of astronomical geography which were intimately connected with man’s knowledge of the various parts of the known world, or _oikoumene_, as distinguished from the sphere as a whole. PHENOMENA RESULTING FROM DIFFERENCES IN LATITUDE