NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 243 



leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been 

 tne case with Nore and Whetham Hills ; and especially with the 

 ridge between Harteley Park and Ward-le-Ham, where the ground 

 has slid into vast swellings and furrows ; and lies still in such 

 romantic confusion as cannot be accounted for from any other 

 cause. A strange event, that happened not long since, justifies 

 our suspicions ; which, though it befel not within the limits of this 

 parish, yet as it was within the hundred of Selborne, and as the 

 circumstances were singular, may fairly claim a place in a work 

 of this nature. 



The months of January and February, in the year 1774, were 

 remarkable for great melting snows and vast gluts of rain ; so that 

 by the end of the latter month the land-springs, or lavants, began 

 to prevail, and to be near as high as in the memorable winter of 

 1764. The beginning of March also went on in the same tenor ; 

 when, in the night between the 8th and 9th of that month, a con- 

 siderable part of the great woody hanger at Hawkley was torn 

 from its place, and fell down, leaving a high free-stone cliff naked 

 and bare, and resembling the steep side of a chalk-pit. It appears 

 that this huge fragment, being perhaps sapped and undermined 

 by waters, foundered, and was ingulfed, going down in a per- 

 pendicular direction ; for a gate which stood in the field, on the 

 top of the hill, after sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, 

 remained in so true and upright a position as to open and shut 

 with great exactness, just as in its first situation. Several oaks 

 also are still standing, and in a state of vegetation, after taking 

 the same desperate leap. That great part of this prodigious mass 

 was absorbed in some gulf below, is plain also from the inclining 

 ground at the bottom of the hill, which is free and unincumbered; 

 but would have been buried in heaps of rubbish, had the fragment 

 parted and fallen forward. About a hundred yards from the foot 

 of this hanging coppice stood a cottage by the side of a lane ; and 

 two hundred yards lower, on the other side of the lane, was a 

 farm-house, in which lived a labourer and his family; and, just by, 

 a stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman 

 and her son, and his wife. These people in the evening, which was 

 very dark and tempestuous, observed that the brick floors of their 



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