OF SELBOBNE. 
261 
This mount may journey, and, his present site 
Forsaking, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer 
The goodly plants, affording matter strange 
For law debates ! " 
But, when I came to consider better, I began to suspect 
that though our hills may never have journeyed far, yet that 
the ends of many of them have slipped and fallen away at 
distant periods, leaving the cliffs bare and abrupt. This 
seems to have been the case with Nore and Whetham Hills, 
and especially with the ridge between Harteley Park and 
Word-le-ham, where the ground has slid into vast swellings 
and furrows, and lies still in such romantic confusion as 
cannot be accounted for from any other cause. A strange 
event, that happened not long since, justifies our suspicions, 
which, though 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 free-stone 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 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 
