218 
NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
** I nor advise, nor reprehend the choice 
Of Marcley Hill ; the apple no where finds 
A kinder mould : yet 'tis unsafe to trust 
Deceitful ground : who knows but that once more 
This mount may journey, and his present site 
Forsaken, to thy neighbour's bounds transfer 
Thy 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 Wardleham, 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 tenour ; when, in the night between the 8th and 9th of that 
month, a considerable part of the great woody hanger at Hawk- 
ley 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 posi- 
tion 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 hi]l, 
which is free and unincumbered; but would have been buried 
in heaps of rubbish had the fragment parted and fallen forward. 
About a hundred yards from the foot of this hanging coppice 
