the London and Hampshire Basins. 195 



Ordnance Map^ it is to be observed that there is a very remark- 

 able valley separating the broad expanse of lower greensand 

 country in the neighbourhoods of Maidstone and of Sevenoaks, 

 into two groups : I shall call it the valley of Plaxtole, from the 

 village of that name. Here all the thick and tenacious beds of 

 the Kentish-rag, as well as the upper beds of the greensand, have 

 been swept clean away, so that the drainage from the country 

 up to the foot of the chalk hills, above Ightham and Rotham 

 (through which this fissure does not appear to extend), is brought 

 down by a rivulet running in the bottom of the valley, due south 

 toward the Medway, near Tunbridge. The escarpments of this 

 valley are anticlinal; and there is, unless it has been lately 

 quarried away, a remarkable group of rocks on the road from 

 Plaxtole to Crouch, tilted westward, and giving undeniable 

 testimony of the extraordinary swell of the Weald clay below. 

 Another remarkable instance of this sort of anticlinal may be 

 seen in a ridge running north and south between Wotton and 

 Portnail, and crossed by the road from the former place to Dor- 

 king. This anticlinal ridge throws the watershed of the country 

 westward into the Wey by Albury and Shalford, and eastward 

 into the Mole by Dorking. And there can be no doubt that 

 the copious springs which arise in that part of the Leith Hill 

 country, each side of this anticlinal, are thrown out by the same 

 disturbance. If we turn to the south side of the Weald again, 

 we find examples of the same sort of transverse anticlinal dispo- 

 sition. The affluent of the western Rother, which in my early 

 publication I have called " the Lod," cuts the high grounds of 

 lower greensand at Lodsworth transversely ; and the anticlinal 

 disposition is to be seen at Halfway-bridge on the Petworth 

 and Midhurst road. Again, the same disruption is to be observed 

 where another affluent of the river before-mentioned runs by 

 Petworth. The tilting of the beds east and west is visible in the 

 hollow ways near the bridge, on each side of the stream at 

 Haslingbourne*. 



Of the transverse valleys, and the fissures in which they ori- 

 ginated, which properly belong to the more prominent longitu- 

 dinal flexures, and which Mr. Hopkins has made use of in illus- 

 tration of his theory of elevation, I will cite two remarkable ex- 

 amples. They have already been cursorily mentioned in my former 

 memoir (pp. 48 and 134), but it will be well to pay more particular 



* I quote from memory, but I think that there appeared in the " Pro- 

 ceedings of the Geological Society " some time since, a description of a 

 transverse upheaval like these here spoken of, which could be traced all 

 across the Weald from th6 neighbourhood of Bletchingley to the South 

 Downs, controlling and directing the watershed east and west. I have not 

 examined the ground, but I have no doubt of the fact, as there described. 



