230 FALL OF A CLIFF. 



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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 : 

 that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, 

 becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versa : that 

 many large oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, 



