2i8 HOUSE, GARDEN, AND FIELD 



and survey the country stretched out beneath us, we should 

 see the chalk wolds standing up as a great step or ridge. 

 They begin in the sea- cliffs of Flamborough Head, curve 

 southward, and in the course of a few miles reach the 

 Humber. Where we now are the depth of the chalk is 

 so great that the river makes only a trifling notch in it, 

 and the chalk spreads without a break into Lincolnshire, 

 slants across the county in a south-easterly direction, 

 dipping beneath banks of sand, clay and shingle some 

 miles before the Wash is reached. Beyond the Wash 

 the chalk rises again, covers a great part of Norfolk, and 

 continues towards the south-west through Cambridge- 

 shire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, 

 Hampshire and Dorset. The tertiaries of the Hampshire 

 basin, though on the map they seem to cut the chalk in 

 two, merely overlie it. It continues all the way beneath 

 the surface, and reappears on the south coast of the Isle 

 of Wight. In Kent and Sussex it has been upheaved, 

 and the lower formations of the Weald rise through it, 

 the chalk sloping away on all sides like the rim of a crater 

 except where the sea and the issuing rivers have worn 

 it away. In the south-eastern counties it has therefore 

 both an eastern and a western escarpment, each showing 

 a very irregular outline on the map. Beneath the straits 

 of Dover the beds continue without known break into 

 France, whither we shall not follow them. The strait is 

 so shallow, only 150 feet in the deepest part, that it does 

 not nearly cut through the chalk, here about a thousand 

 feet thick. To the east of the great chalk ridge of England 

 come tertiary and other deposits, which are soft and 

 incoherent, forming no bold features. These occupy the 

 low countries, Southern Hanover, Brandenburg and most 

 of the great North-German plain, so that an Englishman 

 who stands on the Gogmagogs or the Wolds knows that 

 there is no higher ground to the east between him and 

 Russia. 

 Chalk is not a hard rock, but it stands out of the plain 



