at Chipping in Lancashire. 211 



found strewn upon the ground several feet above the steep bank 

 of the stream ; and trees stripped of their bark, four or five feet 

 above the bed of the brook, by the passage of stones, bear testi- 

 mony to the force of the current. Where the channel is narrow, 

 the wreck is still left hanging at the height of seven, and in one 

 place of nine feet, above the usual surface of the water. In 

 some places the bed has been lowered to the depth of a yard ; 

 in others a new channel has been worked out in the clay, and 

 the old one filled up with stones and gravel. 



At intervals throughout its course trees of considerable size 

 have been rooted up and carried down till some immoveable 

 obstacle arrested them, or left dry upon the fields on the retiring 

 of the waters. I learned from a farmer living by the side of the 

 brook, that the flood reached its height in less than twenty 

 minutes, and that for the space of about half an hour the rain 

 fell with extreme violence. At a small farm a little to the west 

 of this, and situated on an exposed declivity on the southern side 

 of Saddle Fell, I was told that the rain fell with great violence 

 for above two hours. It was described to me as having the 

 appearance of flakes of snow, and it was said that ^^ every drop 

 seemed of the size of a half-crown. ^^ At this place the water 

 streamed down the road to the depth of from one to two feet ', 

 and yet upon examination I found that the whole extent of 

 ground drained by this road could scarcely be half an acre. This 

 will aid in conveying an idea of the extraordinary and even tro- 

 pical violence of the rain which could have produced such a flood 

 in so short a period. The summit of this road is the extreme 

 limit of the lands drained by the little brook of which we have 

 been speaking. 



An observer standing at this point and facing west, has before 

 him a spacious basin, open on the left, bounded by Parlick in 

 front, and by the main chain of hills on the right. Beneath is 

 the principal brook which terminates in two gorges among the 

 hills, from which its waters are supplied. The easternmost of 

 these, called Greenlough Clough, presented a sight more asto- 

 nishing than anything I had ever seen. At the point where its 

 bed opens out from the hills, scarcely a mile from the watershed, 

 many hundreds of tons of large stones are thrown together in a 

 great heap, covering an area of about forty yards in extreme 

 width and at least eighty in length. These stones had been 

 carried down the steep ravine by the impetuosity of the torrent 

 and heaped up at this place, where the waters, being spread over 

 a larger surface, had no longer the force to bear them along. 

 Still, on ascending the ravine and examining the sides of the 

 hill above the mark which the waters had reached, I found the 

 heath and fern growing fresh and unsullied, and presenting no 

 appearance of having been washed by any great flow of water. " 



