298 TYNEDALE ESCABPMENTS ; 



may have played upon the submerged surface, or waves and cur- 

 rents rushed through narrows or beat on emerging shores, I 

 will apply this theory to the phenomena of the Northumbrian 

 escarpments. Standing upon a line of shore-like banks, here 

 advancing into rocky headlands, there retiring in sloped bays, 

 one is fain to call up an expanse of sea in front and a whiten- 

 ing surf at base, l^o analogy, however, is apt to be so de- 

 lusive as the analogy that appeals strongly to the imagination. 

 The complete correspondence of these cliffs, if such they be, with 

 the lines of outcrop, curve and undulate as these may, is enough 

 to arouse strong suspicions of this plausible theory, even in its 

 more obvious aspect. Borrowing from James Geikie, I have 

 called the sea ''a great horizontal saw." Just as a hand-saw 

 cuts across the grain of wood at any angle that may be presented, 

 so the sea tends to ignore stratification, sawing along or across or 

 obliquely, just as comes. This improbability of constant corres- 

 pendence between sea-cliff and outcrop becomes simple impossi- 

 bility when not only repeated in cveiy case, but accompanied by 

 frequent undulations of level. The sea rules the base of its cliffs 

 as straight as water-level can make them ; in headlands and bays 

 alike they conform at foot to horizontal lines.* On the indented 

 Western Coast of JS^orway the eye may trace, mile after mile, in 

 firth and on promontory, the bars that mark the old coast 

 lines, whose parallelism upheaval even for hundreds of feet has 

 scarcely impaired. Lines traced along tlie base of these N'orthum- 

 brian escai'pments, on the contrary, wind up and down continu- 

 ally ; no amount of ingenuity could ever conform them to lines 

 of water-level. The Woodcut (No. 2, p. 288) represents what 

 the eye might take for the shoreline of the chief of them — ^the 

 Whinsill. Its scale, in order to give the slopes as they are on 

 the ground, is necessarily a small one, the breadth of a tolerably 

 fine line representing nearly ten feet, and it is thus incapable 

 of shewing any but the largest curves ; but vaiying as these do 

 between one thousand and about five hundred and eighty feet 

 of elevation by gradual descents, there is enough to mai'k this 



* The piling of beach is Boir.etimci apt to interfere with the evcnneta at the bottom of 

 an old coast line of cliff. This will be remarked &% tlie cane at Mar»dcn. 



