228 NATUEAL HISTORY 



or lavants y 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 it's place, and fell 

 down, leaving a high freestone cliff naked and bare, and re- 

 sembling 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 perpen- 

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

 top of the hill, after sinking with it's 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 it's first situation. Seve- 

 ral 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 an hundred yards from the foot of this hanging cop- 

 pice 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 : but 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 day-light 

 came they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations 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; 



