OF SELBORNE 239 



since, justifies our suspicions ; whichi, tliough it befell 

 not -within the limits of this parish, yet as it was within 

 the hundred of Selborne, and as the circumstances were 

 singular, may fairly claim a place in a work of this nature. 

 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 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 

 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 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 



