65 



XII. 



THE SUBMERGED FOREST, 



Last night's storm, coinciding with the spring tides, 

 has laid bare the beach for a considerable distance ; and 

 this morning, now that the ebb is at its lowest, the 

 stumps and twigs of the sunken forest may be clearly 

 seen protruding from the underlying clay bank. All 

 round the coast of England, wherever the land shelves 

 slowly off to seaward, we may find a curious belt of 

 such drowned woodland, partly uncovered at low tides, 

 and generally filled with broken stumps and trunks of 

 water-logged trees. These submerged forests are usually 

 well known locally by that very name : but hardly 

 enough attention has yet been given to the practical 

 universality of their occurrence in all situations except 

 where the presence of high cliffs clearly indicates that 

 the land-line is being largely and rapidly undermined 

 by the encroaching sea. Such broken stumps and logs 

 are to be found, not here and there, but everywhere. 

 They begin under the level flats of Morecambe Bay and 

 the sands of Dee ; they crop up again in the great 

 bight of Cardigan Bay, where legend still commemorates 

 the flooding of the Lowland Hundred which once occu- 

 pied the space between the rocky barrier of Sarn Badrig 



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