FALL OF A CLIFF. 251 



rain ; so that, by the end of the latter month, the land- 

 springs, or levants, 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 considerable 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 ingulphed, going 

 down in a perpendicular 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 unencumbered, 

 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 

 kitchens began to heave and part, and that the walls seemed 

 to open, and the roofs to crack ; out they all agree that no 

 tremor of the ground, indicating an earthquake, was ever 

 felt, only that the wind continued to make a most tre- 

 mendous roaring in the woods and hangers. The miserable 

 inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained in the utmost 

 solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be 

 buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. "When 

 daylight came, they were at leisure to contemplate the devas- 

 tations of the night. They then found that a deep rift, or 

 chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them, as it 

 were, in two, and that one end of the barn had suffered in a 

 similar manner : that a pond near the cottage had under- 



