320 The Natural History of Selborne 



This mount may journey, and, his present site 

 Forsaken, to thy neighbour s bounds transfer 

 Thy goodly plants, affording matter strange 

 For law debates? 



But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect that 

 though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that the ends of 

 many of them have slipped and fallen away at distant periods, leav- 

 ing the cliffs bare and abrupt. This seems to have been the 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 eighth and ninth 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 ingulfed, 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 unincumbered ; but would have been buried in 

 heaps of rubbish, had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 



