5 1 6 The Frome. 



A change in the story of an old river, even more 

 striking than that of the Thames, has taken place in 

 the history of what was once an important stream further 

 south. Before the formation of the Straits of Dover, 

 the solid land of England, formed of Cretaceous and 

 Eocene strata, extended far south into what is now the 

 English Channel. The Isle of Wight still exists as 

 an outlying fragment of that land. At that time the 

 Nine Barrow Chalk Downs, north of Weymouth Bay 

 and Purbeck, were directly joined as a continuous 

 ridge with the Downs that cross the Isle of Wight 

 from the Needles to Culver Cliff. Old Harry and his 

 Wife, off the end of Nine Barrow Downs, and the 

 Needles, off the Isle of Wight, are small outlying relics, 

 left by the denudation of the long range of Downs 

 that once joined the Isle of Wight to the so-called 

 Isle of Purbeck, and of the land that lay still farther 

 south of Portland Bill the Isle of Wight and Beachy 

 Head. 



North of this old land, the Frome, which rises in the 

 Cretaceous hills east of Beaminster, still runs, and, much 

 diminished, discharges its waters into Poole Harbour. 

 But in older times the Solent formed part of its 

 valley, where, swollen by its affluents, the Stour, the 

 Avon, the Test, and the Itchin, it must have formed a 

 large river, which, by great subsequent denudations 

 and changes in the level of the land, has resulted in 

 the synclinal hollow through which the semi-estuarine 

 waters of the Solent now flow. 1 



The same kind of argument that has been applied 



1 See Mr. T. Codrington On the Superficial Deposits of the 

 South of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight.' Quart. Jour. Geol. Soc. 

 1870, vol. xxvi., p. 528, and Mr. John Evans, 'Stone Implements,' 

 Chap. XXV. 



