2IO The Natural History 



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 considerable part of the great woody hanger at 

 Hawkley was torn from its place, and fell down, leaving 

 a high freestone 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 engulfed, 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 

 fur 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 an 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 : 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 tremendous roaring in the woods and 

 hangers. The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to 

 bed, remained in the utmost soHcitude and confusion, 

 expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of 

 their shattered edifices. When day-light came they were 



