Chalk cliff

“ The network of underground galleries and chambers is now closed, because the soft chalk rock has fallen in in several places. At Ingrandes-sur-Vienne there are three groups of these refuges, extending to a considerable distance. At Chateau Robin in the Touraine is a chalk cliff that rises above the road to the height of sixty feet and is crowned by a tumulus. In its face are two sets of caves, one superposed over the other. This upper cave or shelter is the most ancient, and dates from prehistoric times, but has been utilised much later. ”

“ The base of the cliff to the height of a few feet, is seen to consist of the white chalk with its usual layers of flint nodules, forming a low wall or terrace, which slopes seaward, and extends far into the British channel—probably to the opposite coast of France: at low-water a considerable expanse of modern shingle and sand is spread over, and in a great measure conceals, the chalk, at a few yards distance from the cliff. ”

“ Many things may be hastened; you may quicken the growth of many; but you can’t hurry a sponge. Every foot and inch of a chalk cliff, of a118 limestone mountain, must have been formed originally under water with almost incredible slowness. It must have been raised up to meet the clouds of heaven since its formation in the ocean-depth. Do you think that this can have been a rapid process? Volcanic cones, it is true, are sometimes piled up by a sudden effort. But with widespread platforms of solid rock the upheaving forces deal more respectfully. ”

“ We should be overpowered.'
'I do not relish losing everything without making an effort to break through.'
'I can tell you what to do,' said the girl, 'and also where you may conceal everything.'
'Where is that?'
'To-day I saw that the cliff has parted under mother's cottage. The rock is torn in half, and I climbed the crack from the beach to the top. Where I went up you can go down. The crack is quite new and is narrow. At the end it is choked with earth and stones. If you have ropes you can lower the kegs and then steal away by the coast, and by water to Beer. ”

“ It will be seen that the four subdivisions 2, 3, 4, and 5 begin to rise at B, Figure 47, and that at C, where the cliff is 180 feet high, there is a sharp flexure shared equally by the Chalk and the incumbent drift. Between D and G, Figure 48, we observe a great fracture in the rocks with synclinal and anticlinal folds, exhibited in cliffs nearly 300 feet high, the drift beds participating in all the bendings of the Chalk; that is to say, the three lower members of the drift, including Number 2, which, at the point S in this diagram, contains the shells of Recent species before alluded to. ”

“ The Chalk is everywhere very thinly peopled, except where it is thickly covered with boulder clay, and so becomes fertile, or where it is scored by drift-filled valleys, in which the small towns and villages are dotted along the high roads. The thickest covering of drift is found in the Holderness district of Yorkshire, where, from the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head to the sandspit of Spurn Point, the whole coast is formed of boulder-clay resting on chalk. ”

“ These cliffs extend through the north-eastern coast of the island, called Moens Klint, [2] where the Chalk precipices are bold and picturesque, being 300 and 400 feet high, with tall beech-trees growing on their summits, and covered here and there at their base with huge taluses of fallen drift, verdant with wild shrubs and grass, by which the monotony of a continuous range of white Chalk cliffs is prevented.
(FIGURE 47. [omitted] SOUTHERN EXTREMITY OF MOENS KLINT (PUGGAARD) .
A. Horizontal drift. B. Chalk and overlying drift beginning to rise. C. First flexure and fault. ”

“ This rock forms perpendicular bluffs of chalk tufa, and masses of fallen stone lie at their feet. Some rocks overhang, and the whole of this cliff and the fallen blocks have been drilled with openings and converted into habitations for man and for beast. Doors and windows have been cut in the stone, which has been hollowed out as maggots clear out the kernel of a nut. Rooms, kitchens, cellars, stables have been thus contrived. The chimneys run up the rocks, and through them ”

“ Under the thin layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea, when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of an African forest. ”

“ The incessant dashing of the waves against the base of the chalk-cliffs, undermines the strata, and huge masses of rock are constantly giving way and falling into the waters. The chalk then becomes softened and disintegrated, and is quickly reduced to the state of mud, and transported to the tranquil depths of the ocean, where it subsides and forms new deposits; but the flints thus detached, are broken and rolled by attrition into the state of boulders, pebbles, and gravel, and ultimately of sand.
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Lign. ”

“ Farther along the chalk cliffs stand up clear and sharp, the green sea beneath, and the blue sky above them. There is a light and colour everywhere, the least fragment of colour is brought out, even the worn red tiles washed smooth by the tides and rolled over and over among the pebbles, the sea gleams, and there is everything of summer but the heat. ”

“ You find yourself standing in a very narrow road, on the left hand of which a sheer slab of rock rises to the height of 600 or 700 feet above—its surface rent with fissures, here and there dotted by stunted firs, which cling like weeds to its surface, diversified with all the tints for which volcanic rocks are remarkable. At the base of this cliff, which stretches further than the sight can trace it, there is a ragged fringe of mighty boulders, of fragments of mountains tossed down in the wildest confusion amid the straggling brushwood. ”

“ The sides of the cliffs rise to a height of about four hundred feet. Why and how the river forced its way through this isolated, granite cone, seems a mystery, as there is apparently no obstacle to prevent its flowing undisturbed round the lower borders of the south slope. Some great convulsion of nature must have split the mountain through its center and opened this channel. The chasm was certainly not formed by erosion, for the sides of the cliff expose a face of grey, weather-stained granite, with perpendicular seams and scoriated trap rock. ”

“ This rift was the channel of a swift black current which ran from the sea for fifty yards under an arch eight feet high, until it broke upon the jagged rocks that lay blistering in the sunshine at the bottom of the circular opening in the upper cliff. A shudder shook the limbs of the adventurous convict. He comprehended that at high tide the place where he stood was under water, and that the narrow cavern became a subaqueous pipe of solid rock forty feet long, through which were spouted the league-long rollers of the Southern Sea. ”

“ We crossed the fall, climbed up the rock into another bend of the chasm, where the water makes its first plunge, unseen from below, shut in by crags that wear a sterner frown. You look up to the summit and see the water tumbling through a ring of rock, so strangely has the disruptive shock there broken the cliff. The effect both on ear and eye as the torrent breaks into spray and dashes downwards in fantastic channels, is surprisingly impressive.
Only on one side is the pass accessible, and there so steep that your hands must aid in the ascent. ”

“ It seems to delight in perching and capering upon the very verge of the most frightful precipices and overhanging cliffs, and in skipping from rock to rock, regardless of the yawning chasms, hundreds of feet in depth, which intervene. In fact, when pursued, it does not hesitate, as I have been assured, to leap from a cliff into a valley a hundred or more feet below, where, lighting upon its huge horns, it springs to its feet uninjured; for the neck is so thick and strong as to support the greatest shock the animal's weight can bring upon it. ”

“ And everywhere is a loose, friable rubble that settles into soft powder beneath the feet. Climbing here is a dangerous and exciting business altogether!
But, next to this striking colouring, it is the sculpture of the rocky cliffs due to erosion that touches the imagination, and touches it very powerfully. Many of the gorges run to a depth of several hundred feet, the soft, lower strata worn away, and the resisting siliceous layers left upon the top like solid tablecloths. These valleys end abruptly, often in a cirque⁠—a crater-like semicircle of sheer cliff. ”

“ An uninterrupted path runs, for some three or four miles, along the top of the cliff—the scene constantly changing in its beauty. Below hangs a broken under-cliff, shelving down to the sea, strewed here and there with blocks of gravel, the grass and furze growing on them just as they fell. On the shore stretch long reaches of yellow sand, separated by narrow strips of pebbles, and patches of dark green Barton clay, embossed with shells, and studded with sharks' teeth. ”

“ As the greater part of these drifts are barren of organic remains, their classification is at present a matter of great uncertainty.
They can nowhere be so advantageously studied as on the coast between Happisburgh and Cromer. Here we may see vertical cliffs, sometimes 300 feet and more in height, exposed for a distance of fifty miles, at the base of which the chalk with flints crops out in nearly horizontal strata. Beds of gravel and sand repose on this undisturbed chalk. They are often strangely contorted, and envelop huge masses or erratics of chalk with layers of vertical flint. ”

“ The old man forgot me and relapsed into mutterings, quivering under each shrill onslaught of the wind, pausing to listen for the moan of the surf below.
"You're deucedly close to this cliff," I ventured once, when a shower of sand swished against the window-pane.
"Eh—the cliff? Some winter nights she'll rise up to the very house and drench the glass of my windows—the sea will," he shuddered. "She's eating back—eating back; forty years ago, when I first came here, there was a front yard." ”

“ The interest of the view under this impending cliff is somewhat heightened by the probability that it will fall into the abyss sometime within the next six months. Since the fall of the most projecting part of it, two or three winters since, a large and very deep crack has widened around the remaining area of the platform above, and it is thought that it will scarce survive the next frost. At present, spite of the threat, troops of ladies and gentlemen crowd its broad summit at all hours, walking, drawing, gazing, and philandering, in the fullest confidence that rocks have bases. ”

“ Abruptly rising again over the Tomahawk ridge with its reefs lying half a mile out in the ocean, the homes of a number of well-to-do old settlers may be seen scattered on the hills and valleys around. Then again dropping down gently to sea level in another valley, an uphill pinch has to be tackled, which, on being accomplished, we now reach the top of the cliff with a sheer face of 800 feet, and at whose base the waters are perpetually surging and lashing, slowly but gradually undermining the solid wall which has resisted and will for centuries continue to resist their attacks. ”

“ Along the cliffs on that side the two varieties of rock are strongly distinguished by their contrasting colour and mode of weathering, the sombre-hued pitchstone standing up in a huge precipice striped with columns, and barred horizontally with bands of the pale-grey "porphyry," which, from its greater proneness to decay, seems sunk into the face of the cliff. At the south-east end of the ridge the bedding is especially distinct. ”

“ Let one who has breasted the sweltering heat-waves that radiate from Obsidian Cliff in July, trying to picture the impressive beauty of that massive pile of volcanic glass through the translucent dust-clouds raised by the passage of two or three score cars—let him fancy that cliff, its summit crowned with a feathered crest of snow, huge drifts at its base, and its whole face, washed and polished by the elements, glittering as though panelled with shining ebony. ”

“ Seen from the great height of this knife-edge ridge the valley is grotesque with its lifting crags of rough cliff, so solidly built of rock that no green thing finds a crevice in which to grow, or so steep as to defy any wind-borne seed to find a lodging there. These rough rock cliffs have grotesque resemblance to the shaggy heads of prehistoric animals of more than gigantic size that seem to have been turned into stone where they lie, their bodies half buried and - 228 - concealed by the luxuriant growth of forest that still surges round them. A lumber company is known by its cut. ”

“ But on our southern coasts, the wall-sided cliffs, many hundred feet high, with vast needles and pinnacles standing out in the sea, sharp and solitary enough to serve as perches for the wary cormorant, confer a wonderful beauty and grandeur upon the chalk headlands. And in the East, chalk has its share in the formation of some of the most venerable of mountain ranges, such as the Lebanon. ”

“ As we approached nearer, the ledges were full of grim recesses, rude rock-niches, and traversed by perpendicular cracks from brow to base. “Take care!” I shouted; “there is a huge piece of the cliff just ready to fall.”
In some places the rock is sheer and smooth, in others it is broken regularly down, for half its whole height, to where it is joined by rude buttresses of massive granite. The lithe maples climb up the steepest ravines, but cannot pass the waste of sheer rock stretching between them and the firs, which look down over the brink of the precipice. ”