SUBSOIL OF WESTMINSTER. 
225 
ever way the wind blew. But their favourite leads were 
those over the drawing-room, college hall, and Jerusalem 
Chamber, looking west. Magnificent sunsets were to be 
seen from these, particularly in the short winter days, when 
the wreaths of blue smoke came curling up from the 
chimneys of the low red-tiled roofs of old Westminster 
slums, and formed into fantastic-shaped purple and golden 
and crimson clouds as they caught the rays of the setting 
sun over St. James’s Park and Buckingham Palace. 
It was natural that the Dean, with his turn for geology 
and sanitary science, should carefully examine the soil on 
which the Abbey is built, and this is his report:— 
“ Thorney Island, the site of the Abbey and adjacent 
parts of Westminster, between the Thames and the lake 
in St. James’s Park (which was once a swampy creek 
crossing between Charing Cross and Whitehall into the 
Thames), is a peninsula of the purest sand and gravel, 
which may be seen in the foundations of the Abbey and in 
the new deep graves in the Churchyard of St. Margaret’s. 
The surface of the peninsula is several feet above high 
water mark ; its north frontier is marked by the steps 
ascending from the Horse Guards Parade to Duke Street, 
and by the Terrace, covered with houses, on the south of 
Birdcage Walk, whence it extends under Wellington 
Barracks to Buckingham Palace Gardens and Hyde Park. 
By the isthmus under this terrace, the peninsula of Thorney 
Island is connected with the gravel beds of Hyde Park, 
from whence the rain-water which fills the lower region of 
that gravel, and of the gravel in the Palace Gardens, has 
unbroken communication with the pure sand and gravel 
of the so-called Thorney Island (really a peninsula), and 
hence pure and much sought after water is supplied to the 
well and pump in Dean’s Yard, and other wells in St. 
Peter’s College, and to a pump near the north end of St. 
Margaret’s Church.” 
IS 
