The Landslip near Ventnor
NATURE is seldom catastrophic in her methods in these favoured islands, but now and then we have a brief taste of her power. On Thursday in last week a tract of some sixty acres on the edge of the cliff at Niton, in the southern corner of the Isle of Wight, suddenly began to slide seaward. The enormous mass of earth and rock, which for ages had lain securely on an underlying stratum of gault and clay, had for some reason become unsettled. Moving downward on a front of a quarter of a mile, it buried part of the well-known Undercliff Drive and formed, with later subsidences, a new gorge with a small lake. The movement has continued, and man can do nothing but wait till the uneasy masses are again in equilibrium.
To the geologist who thinks in epochs this landslip is nothing exceptional. He knows that natural forces, whether of wind or rain or springs or the sea, to say nothing of the strains and stresses of the earth's crust which we call earthquakes, are perpetually at work, ever modifying the configuration of the earth. Poets wrongly talk of the unchanging hills, which, be they never so hard, are worn down by the erosion of storms. The valleys and the shores are subject to more frequent alteration, even when they are not rising or• falling under the influence of some subterranean thrill. But in the brief span of human life the landscape with which we are familiar rarely changes to even so modest an extent as at Niton. No one living can remember the great landslip that took place in 1818 between Ventnor and Shanklin, and formed the eastern part of the Undercliff that so many of us have admired. Keats stayed at Shanklin a year later, but did not mention in his letters to Fanny Browne the tangled mass of rock and rubbish that has long since been overgrown with briar and hazel and honeysuckle, to hide the wounds in Mother Earth.
Even in our long historical records there are relatively few definite references to important topographical changes. At some points along our coast towns have slipped or been washed into the sea. The original Selsey, for example, where Christian missionaries once baptised heathen South Saxons, lies under water to the south of the Bill. Reculver, which in Tudor times was half a mile from . high water -mark, fell into the sea in George the Third's day, all save the front of the church. Dunwich, in mediaeval times a busy port, has long since fallen victim to the North Sea ; the fragment of the church that still clings to the edge of a flimsy cliff is clearly doomed. South of Lowestoft the cliffs have been slipping down into the sea for years past. At the mouth of the Humber there was once the port of Ravenspur z Edward the Fourth landed there in March, 1471, when he came to recover his kingdom. But Ravenspur has disappeared beneath the waves. To go back to Kent, the high cliffs west of Dover have suffered from many a landslip like that of Niton. During the War a heavy fall put the Folkestone-Dover line and road out of action, and Shakespeare's 'Cliff was shorn of some of its grandeur. The Warren, nearer to Folkestone, is the picturesque result of earlier slips. Some of these were clearly post- Roman for, when Mr. Winbolt -found the Roman villa on the cliff a year or two ago, he detected it by means of a Roman drainpipe that projected from the cliff-face.
When the Roman admiral commanding the naval station lived in that villa and could look across to his opposite number at Boulogne, he must have thought the site perfectly firm and secure ; but part of it long ago fell on to the foreshore: Sandgate suffered much from a landslip in 1893. In all these cases the unceasing action of water without and within did the damage. Sometimes the catastrophe was recorded, and sometimes not, save in legend. What coast people does not cherish stories of cities lying under the sea, with their church bells ringing in the tide ?
There is another side to the endless process of Nature. Sometimes it is constructive. When Caesar came to astonish and conquer the East Britons, Romney Marsh was an arm of the sea, flooded at high tide up to Appledore and the high bank below Aldington and Lympne, with a narrow spit of shingle from Hythe to Dymchurch. But the set of the tides up Channel gradually built up the coast east of Hastings, and the artificial embankment, known as the Rhee Wall and probably Roman, from near Apple- dore to Dymchurch converted the upper part of the Marsh into the fertile pastures that we know to-day. So the once famous port of Rye gradually found the sea receding from it. And Edward the First had no sooner laid out his new port of Winchelsea, to replace an older port swallowed by the sea, than the burgesses discovered that they were high and dry and had not the heart to finish the royal plan. Henry the Eighth two and half centuries later could build his castle of Camber where the fishes had played at New Winchelsea's birth. Take, again, the case of Yarmouth. In Roman days its site was a shingle bank in the mouth of a broad estuary up which the galleys sailed to Norwich. The bank grew, and the estuary contracted ; fishermen settled on the shingle and Yarmouth came into being. Man transformed the Fens by constant toil through generations. Nature's methods are slower than his, but far more effective.
Yet all the changes that can be traced since our recorded history began are relatively trivial in the geologist's eyes. He can point to elevations or subsidences which have occurred since the Neolithic age. Thus in Southern Scotland, Northern England and Ireland the land was raised some twenty feet, with the result that a broad strip of flat alluvial fringes the estuaries and provides good soil for tillage. On the other hand, a long stretch of land from the Bristol Channel to the Humber has sunk some fifty feet, enabling the sea to penetrate far up what were once river valleys and to deepen many once shallow har- bours. And these movements of the earth, stupendous as they seem in comparison with our modest and fragmentary landslips, are as nothing beside the far mightier convul- sions of a more distant past. Geology teaches humility, if man can ever learn that virtue in face of the eternal.
Previous page
