Sea cliff

“ They ascended the cliff, but the darkness permitted only the white crest of waves to be seen, while the roaring wind mingled its bowlings in dire accord with the wild surges. The awful hour of night, the utter inexperience of many who had never seen the sea before, the wailing of women and cries of children added to the horror of the tumult. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They drew closer and closer to the land, until a towering line of cliffs rose for more than a thousand feet right above their heads. It was a stern and sombre coast, unbroken by any bays or inland glimpses, and gloomy and terrible in the fading light. The great oily swell broke into spouts of foam at the cliff-foot, and all along the face of the precipice they could see innumerable sea-fowl clinging to the rock.
Gradually, as they sailed along this hostile land, a light sea-fog began to gather. ”

“ When the winter storms slam the roaring billows against the cliff faces and the spray flies up a hundred feet from the exploding mass, the little sea-larks only mount to higher levels of the cliff, never coming inland or forsaking its salt-spattered resting-place. ”

“ In the Isle of Wight massive cliffs rise hundreds of feet above the sea, and seem as if they were as solid as the framework of the earth itself. But they rest upon a sharply inclined plane of clay, and the moisture trickles through the rifts in the majestic cliffs above, and gets down to that slippery substance and makes it like the greased ways down which they launch a ship; and away goes the cliff one day, with its hundreds of feet of buttresses that have fronted the tempest for centuries, and it lies toppled in hideous ruin on the beach below. ”

“ Underneath the cliff is one of those curious basins hollowed out almost with the regularity of art, in which a vessel of large tonnage might be floated. On the farther side of this basin, the ledges, though jagged and wave-worn, [Pg 116] descend with regular incline, making a sort of platform. On the top of the cliff the rock débris and line of soil show unmistakably that in severe gales the sea leaps to this great height, drenching the summit with salt spray. At such a time the sea must be superb, though awful; for I doubt if a human being could stand erect before such a storm. ”

“ The walk towards the last-named is one of the wildest solitude, the only living creatures being the white sea-birds, and the only sounds the murmur of the waves as they surge round the bleak pinnacles of rock. Here and there, where the track-way turns at an angle, we catch a glimpse of vast cavernous recesses, some natural and some the work of men's hands, where ponderous masses have been riven away from the face of the cliff, and tumbled headlong into the water, where they lie amid the swirling eddies of the tide. ”

“ At low tide a narrow strip of black shingle shows between the nearer of these titanic fragments and the face of the cliff. The force has been at work at other points of the coast as well. A mile or so to the north it has broken down and scattered seaward a great section of the cliff, scarring the water with a hundred jagged menaces to navigation, and leaving behind it a torn sea front and a wide, uneven beach. ”

“ At the foot of sea cliffs, where the waves are pounding hardest, one commonly finds the rock bench strewn on its inner margin with large stones, dislodged by the waves and by the weather and some-what worn on their corners and edges. From this BOWLDER BEACH the smaller fragments of waste from the cliff and the fragments into which the bowlders are at last broken drift on to more sheltered places and there accumulate in a PEBBLE BEACH, made of pebbles well rounded by the wear which they have suffered. Such beaches form a mill whose raw material is constantly supplied by the cliff. ”

“ The joints are often pierced, so that the sea penetrates inward. The encroachments of tidal waters are recorded all along the coast. There are three types of sea-cliff which owe their characters to the rock forming them. First, the crystalline schists and old gneiss, which form a range of precipices running northward on the west coast of Scotland to Cape Wrath; crumpled, folded, and irregularly jointed, it is strikingly rugged, full of deep recesses and tunnels, and buttresses which extend into the sea. A second type of cliff ia formed by the Cambrian sandstones of the west coast. ”

“ It was soon certain we were within a cable's length of perpendicular cliffs of several hundred feet in height, into whose caverns the sea poured at times, producing those frightful, hollow moanings, that an experienced ear can never mistake. This cliff extended for leagues in both directions, rendering drowning nearly inevitable to the shipwrecked mariner on that inhospitable coast. Ahead, astern, outside of us, and I might almost say all around us, became visible, one after another, detached ledges, breakers and ripples ”

“ The soft shiver of the wellnigh surfless sea on a rising tide, rose, fell, rose, fell. The sand cliff shone like a bank of snow. And all was inhabited, as a moonlit night is wont to be, by a magical Presence. A big moth went past her face, so close that she felt the flutter of its wings. ”

“ During violent shocks, steep and overhanging cliffs are often thrown down and become a heap of [p.73] ruins. Sometimes unequal movements of upheaval or depression entirely destroy that horizontality of the base-line which constitutes the chief peculiarity of an ancient sea-cliff.
It is, however, in countries where hard limestone rocks abound, that inland cliffs retain faithfully the characters which they acquired when they constituted the boundary of land and sea. Thus, in the Morea, no less than three, or even four, ranges of what were once sea-cliffs are well preserved. ”

“ It presented an extraordinary appearance, gradually increasing in height, as we got nearer to it, and proving at length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward face. What was beyond it we could not imagine; for being much higher than our mast-head, we could not see any thing except the summit of a lofty range of mountains extending to the southward as far as the seventy-ninth degree of latitude. ”

“ And high tide mark was the cliff base in fine weather, in foul, the waves would lash and dash and beat fifty feet up, there was not a guillemot ledge lower than eighty feet, puffins, razorbills and kittiwakes, who always build above the guillemots did not seem to come here at all, keeping to the seaward rocks and the coast line where the cliffs drew further away from the sea. ”

“ The cliff is undermined exactly as are those still under the influence of the waves, and even the detailed marking of the rock surface characteristic of this marine erosion remains, not yet obliterated by the flaking away of the surface through the action of the sun’s heat and the cold [135] of the clear nights, or by the filing action of the sand blasts of summer. ”

“ The fishing-nets were set but obtained only one white-fish and a few bull-heads. This part of the coast is the most sterile and inhospitable that can be imagined. One trap-cliff succeeds another with tiresome uniformity and their débris cover the narrow valleys that intervene, to the exclusion of every kind of herbage. From the summit of these cliffs the ice appeared in every direction.
We obtained the following observations during our stay: latitude 67° 42′ 15′′ North, longitude 112° 30′ 00′′ West, variation 47° 37′ 42′′ East. ”

“ The travelling along these cliffs was very bad, and at a break I descended to the narrow margin of sand and rocks at their feet, left bare by the receding tide. Here the walking was fairly good, and we made our way along at a good pace for a mile. Now the shore rose boldly up in a sheer cliff nearly a hundred feet in height, and the beach was little more than a mass of fallen rock. In a shallow indentation or bay we, or rather the dog, discovered bubbling up through the sand a spring of cold, pure water which must have been under the sea at high tide. ”

“ Some of us have been along the top of the cliff already, to see if we could make out anything. They're beyond help now if they went there, poor little chaps."
"Let us go to the shore," said Mrs. Power, but the men shook their heads as they accompanied her upon her fruitless errand.
The long wall of cliff which extended for so many miles towards the south came to an abrupt termination near the hamlet, and a flat extent of coast reached thence to the next headland. A narrow lane at right angles to the sea, and bordered by high hedges, led direct to the beach at the point where the cliff ended. ”

“ Fields in cultivation and out of it run to the very edge of the cliff—a sombre cliff of soft, dark earth, stained here and there to unprepossessing rusty red, with trickling chalybeate streams, and showing terrible toothmarks of the voracious sea, that feeds its way inland on this part of the coast at the rate of a yard a year. ”

“ Indeed, the primitive man may be seen just as he was thousands of years ago by visiting the village perched like the eyry of some wild bird about 200 feet up the side of the cliff at East cape, on the Asiatic side of the straits. This bold, rocky cliff, rising sheer from the sea to the height of 2,100 feet, consists of granite, with lava here and there, and the indications point to the overflow of a vast ice sheet from the north, evidences of which are seen in the trend of the ridges on the top, and the form of the narrow peninsula joining the cliff to the mainland. ”

“ Round towards the sea the steep acclivities are all broken, channelled, and weather-worn, with scarcely a sign of vegetation to relieve their general sterility; and huge heaps that have been brought down by successive storms lie strewn about the shore in picturesque confusion. The rocky cliff which rears its naked front almost perpendicularly to a considerable elevation is not without its tale of sorrow, as we gather from the following warning, inscribed upon a block of limestone ”

“ The next gale will take the house down on to the beach, and the sea will soon eat away the rest of their paltry field, so I'm not likely to pay this ne'er-do-weel a hundred pounds for sitting by to see it go. Once their little bit of land has disappeared I'll be careful to put breakwaters along the shore to prevent the waves doing any further damage to my own property, but the sooner that portion of the cliff falls over the better for me. ”

“ We were on a flat ledge some fifty yards in length and about ten broad, thirty feet from the water, and close on a hundred from the top of the cliffs that towered above us. Running back into the cliff were two or three small caves, but there was nothing in them save a few broken barrels and a coil of rope. The ledge itself, though level, was encumbered by numerous massive boulders that had at one time fallen from the beetling cliffs, while to the left ran a path which undoubtedly led to the top of the dizzy heights above us. ”

“ The vertical cliff with notch at its base is varied by the stack of sugar-loaf form carved in softer rocks, or the steeper notched variety cut from harder masses. Sea caves and sea arches yield variations of a curve common to the undercut forms. Wherever the materials of the shore are loosely consolidated only, the sloping cliff is formed at the angle of repose of the materials. The barrier beach, though projecting but a short distance above the waves, shows an unsymmetrical curve of cross section with the steeper slope toward the land. ”

“ These may be termed for convenience cliff shores and wall-beach shores. We shall begin our inquiry with cliff shores, for in those sections of the coast line the sea is doing its most characteristic and important work of assaulting the land. If the student has an opportunity to approach a set of cliffs of hard rock in time of heavy storm, when the waves have somewhere their maximum height, he should seek some headland which may offer him safe foothold whence he can behold the movements which are taking place. ”

“ Calling the attention of my companion to this appearance, we soon also discovered our own figures standing on the summit of the opposite apparent cliff, as well as the representation of a windmill near at hand. The reflected images were most distinct precisely opposite to where we stood; and the false cliff seemed to fade away, and to draw near to the real one, in proportion as it receded toward the west. This phenomenon lasted about ten minutes, till the sun had risen nearly his own diameter above the sea. ”

“ In the general subaerial denudation of a country, innumerable minor features are worked out as the structure of the rocks controls the operations of the eroding agents. Thus, among comparatively undisturbed strata, a hard bed resting upon others of a softer kind is apt to form along its outcrop a line of cliff or escarpment. Though a long range of such cliffs resembles a coast that has been worn by the sea, it may be entirely due to mere atmospheric waste. Again, the more resisting portions of a rock may be seen projecting as crags or knolls. ”