This mount may journey, and, his present site
Forsaking, to thy neighbour’s bounds transfer
The goodly plants, affording matter strange
For law debates.
Marcley Hill is near the confluence of the Lug and Wye, about six miles east of Hereford. In the year 1595, it was, says Mr Brown, the editor of White’s Selborne, ‘after roaring and shaking in a terrible manner for three days together, about six o’clock on Sunday morning put in motion, and continued moving for eight hours, in which time it advanced upwards of two hundred feet from its first position, and mounted seventy-two feet higher than it was before. In the place where it set out, it left a gap four hundred feet long, and three hundred and twenty broad; and in its progress it overthrew a chapel, together with trees and houses that stood in its way.’
That interesting naturalist, Mr White of Selborne, gives at length, in one of his letters to the Honourable Daines Barrington, an account of an extraordinary landslip in his own neighbourhood, at a date corresponding with that of the landslip in Shropshire. He says: ‘The months of January and February 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 levants [eastern; so called, I suppose, because of the prevalence of easterly winds at this season], 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 ‘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 unencumbered, 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 farmhouse, in which lived a labourer and his family; and just by, a stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman, her son, and his wife. These people, in the evening, which was very dark and tempestuous, observed that the brick floors of their kitchens began to heave and part, and that the walls seemed to open and the roofs to crack; but they all agree that no tremor of the ground indicating an earthquake was ever felt, only that the wind continued to make a tremendous roaring in the woods and hangers. The miserable inhabitants, not daring to go to bed, remained in the utmost solicitude and confusion, expecting every moment to be buried under the ruins of their shattered edifices. When daylight came, they were at leisure to contemplate the devastations of the night. They then found that a deep rift, or chasm, had opened under their houses, and torn them as it were in two, and that one end of the barn had suffered in a similar manner; that a pond near the cottage had undergone a strange reverse, becoming deep at the shallow end, and so vice versâ; that many large oaks were removed out of their perpendicular, some thrown down, and some fallen into the heads of neighbouring trees; and that a gate was thrust forward with its hedge full six feet, so as to require a new track to be made to it. From the foot of the cliff, the general course of the ground, which is pasture, inclines in a moderate descent for half a mile, and is interspersed with some hillocks, which were lifted in every direction, as well towards the great woody hanger as from it. In the first pasture the deep clefts began, and running across the lane and under the buildings, made such vast shelves that the road was impassable for some time; and so over to an arable field on the other side, which was strangely torn and disordered. The second pasture-field, being more soft and springy, was protruded forward without many fissures in the turf, which was raised in long ridges resembling graves, lying at right angles to the motion. At the bottom of this inclosure, the soil and turf rose many feet against the bodies of some oaks that obstructed their further course, and terminated this awful commotion.’ Passing by a number of catastrophes of this nature occurring at earlier dates, we propose to give some interesting particulars concerning one which took place in the early part of this century in Switzerland, where they are very frequent. In one corner of the canton of Schweitz are the lakes Wallenstadt, Zug, and Lowertz. Near the last is a mountain called the Righi, and a smaller one, the Rossberg. The latter is composed of strata of freestone, pudding-stone—a conglomeration of coarse sandstone, with silicious pebbles, flints, &c.; and clay, with frequent blocks of granite, in the lower part. On the 2d of September 1806, a large portion of this mountain—a mass about a thousand feet in width, a hundred feet in depth, and nearly three miles in length—slipped into the valley below. It was not merely the summit or a projecting crag which fell, but an entire bed of strata extending from the top to nearly the bottom. A long continuance of heavy rains had softened the strata of clay, which sloped downwards; and so the mass was set free, and slipped into the valley, a chaos of stones, earth, clay, and clayey mud. For hours before the catastrophe there had been signs of some convulsion approaching. Early in the morning and at intervals during the day there were noises as if the mountain were in the throes of some great pang, so that it seemed to tremble with fear; so much so, that the furniture shook in the houses of the villages of Arth and St Ann. About two o’clock, a superstitious farmer, who dwelt high up the mountain, hearing a strange kind of cracking noise, and thinking it was the work of some demon, ran down to Arth to fetch the priest to exorcise the evil spirit. There were now openings in the turf, and stones were ejected in a few instances. In the hamlet of Unter Rothen, at the foot of the mountain, a man was digging in his garden, when he found his spade thrust back out of the soil, and the earth spurted up like water from a fountain. As the day advanced, the cracks in the ground became larger, portions of rock fell; springs began to flow, and frightened birds took wing in confusion, uttering discordant screams. About five o’clock, the vast mass of material set loose began to move. At first the movement was slow, and there were repeated pauses. An old man sitting at his door smoking his pipe, was told by a neighbour that the mountain was falling. He thought there was plenty of time, and went indoors to fill his pipe again; but his neighbour ran down the valley, falling repeatedly by reason of the agitation of the ground, and escaped with difficulty. When he looked back to the village, the old man’s house had disappeared. In the space of about three minutes, the vast mass, separated into two portions, had descended three miles, sweeping everything before it. The smaller portion took a course towards the foot of the Righi, destroying the hamlets of Spitzbuhl, Ober and Unter Rothen. Its velocity was such as to carry enormous fragments to a great height up the opposite mountain. A peasant who survived the calamity, was engaged in cutting down a tree near his house, when a noise like thunder arrested his attention; he felt the ground tremble under his feet, and he was immediately thrown down by a current of air. Retaining his presence of mind, a dreadful scene presented itself; the tree he had been cutting down, his house, and every familiar object, had disappeared, and an immense cloud of dust enveloped him.