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 Ward-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 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 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 post 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 a 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