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Throughout the whole valley they were embedded at the depth of from 
12ft. to 20ft. Opposite the Glo’ster Hotel, after passing through the 
silt, the workmen discovered, at the depth of 20 feet, small pieces of 
rounded chalk, the whole having the appearance of the bed of a 
stream. At the bottom of Cheapside, this bed was 11 feet beneath the 
surface, in which were pebbles like those lying among the shingle of 
our shore. At the junction of the Montpellier and London-road the 
same deposit was met with at the depth of seven feet, showing how, in 
the higher portion of the valley, the silt overlying the chalk thinned off. 
The deposit reached a considerable distance up the sloping part of the 
hill, even as high as Chatham-place in the Mountpellier-road, but was 
nowhere found up the abrupt and steep ascents. 
The high hills on each ride of the valley plainly told a tale when 
they were cliffs, with sea-waves laving their bases; for even now, 
though rounded and worn down by the attrition of ages, their steep- 
ness revealed this fact. 
Pool Valley pointed to a time when that locality was a pool indeed, 
and the Level a level of waters, fed by rivers issuing from the Weald. 
The thickness and quality of the silt indicated some remote era when 
the whole valley was one vast sheet of water. That this era was not 
antecedent to the Glacial epoch might be inferred from the fact of the 
silt reposing upon a Post-Pliocene formation. At first the valley was 
an estuary of the sea, into which flowed rivers through fissures in the 
Downs, bringing down the debris of the denuded Weald, mingled with 
the wrecks of the chalk and Tertiary strata, which, with the bones of 
the mammoth, the horse, the ox, and the deer, were deposited in an 
estuary, into which the sea also bore remains of the whale and shells 
of an arctic type, till the deposit rose, layer by layer, above the waves. 
Then the old sea-beach upon which it reposed, and which had also sunk 
to receive it some 50ft. or 60ft., with the atlas chalk beneath it, was 
bodily raised from 12ft. to 15ft. above their former level! Probably, 
previous to this upheaval of the Brighton cliffs was the elevation of 
the hills behiud, thereby closing the flood-gates through which the 
Weald once poured its waters into our valley. Then commenced the 
drainage of the hills, the wearing-down of the cliffs, the silting up of 
the Brighton levels, the retiring of the sea, and the gain of fertile dis- 
tricts which ocean has once more claimed as its own. 
It has been seen whence came the sandstones in our cliff deposit. . 
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