Gremlin?

Dorset war artwork is preserved (Rod Minchin, Western Morning News, March 17, 2015) reports on the successful conservation of a characterful mural painted in 1942 by Flight Sgt Sidney Beaumont of 263 Squadron. The logo is similar to one painted by Sgt Beaumont on his Westland Whirlwind aircraft.

The Great Sea Dragons and other weirdness

"Ow, me neck!"

Lyme Regis Museum Blog just announced what looks an interesting talk by Stephen Locke at Woodmead Halls, Lyme Regis, on Thursday: Thomas Hawkins and his Sea Dragons – a mad, bad, fossil collector? I can't get there that day, but the name rang a bell. I knew Hawkins was buried in Ventnor, Isle of Wight (see the God's Acre photo post Thomas Hawkins 1810-1889), but had never bothered to pursue his details.

Lyme antiquariana

I forgot to mention in the Chimney Rock post that I was almost at the location, Ware Cliff at the western end of Lyme Regis, of the 1685 landing for the Duke of Monmouth's failed attempt to become King of England. A quick search for sources converged on a 19th century Lyme antiquary, George Roberts - I should have looked out for him at Lyme Regis Museum (of which more later in the article).

Chimney Rock

In highly unstable landslip terrains, you nevertheless find the occasional long-standing feature. Chimney Rock, just to the west of Lyme Regis, is an example: one that has been in the guidebooks for nearly two centuries.

Undercliff - there and back again: 3D

I mentioned before that the landscape of the Lyme Regis Undercliff is surprisingly difficult to photograph; images don't convey the depth of the wooded vistas of what I've seen described as the nearest thing England has to a jungle. However, a while back I came round to the view that 3D is an effective medium for handling this, and I took a set of stereopairs during a return visit yesterday.

The Bindon Landslip of 1839

view from Great Bindon - Coneybeare and Buckland monograph
low-res image from Lyme Regis Museum scan

It's probably obvious that I have a bit of an obsession with the coastal landslip terrain of the English south coast. In that vein, I found a real treat yesterday: a new page from Lyme Regis Museum, The Bindon Landslip of 1839, which hosts a high-resolution scan of Conybeare and Buckland's rare monograph Memoir and Views of Landslips on the Coast of East Devon &c. 1840 (with artwork by William Dawson and Mary Buckland).

I've mentioned this classic landslip before: Clare and I visited in June 2010 (see Undercliff: visited at last), and I also wrote about its featuring in Sabine Baring-Gould's 1900 novel Winefred, a story of the chalk cliffs (see Seaton, slips and Sabine Baring-Gould).

Nowadays, the terrain is heavily overgrown, and has been described as "the nearest thing to a jungle in Britain". But the local geologists the Rev William Conybeare and Dr William Buckland visited it shortly after it happened, when the geology was fully exposed, and produced "the first fully scientific report ever produced about a major landslip". The report features remarkable sketches of the fresh landslip, what must have been an amazing and terrifying terrain of dissected blocks of wheatfield with chasms between.

In addition, the report features for comparison a sketch of the Hooken Undercliff between Beer and Branscombe, then relatively fresh from the 1790 slip that created it.

Hooken Undercliff, from Coneybeare and Buckland monograph
low-res image from Lyme Regis Museum scan

Hooken Undercliff, October 2010

Anyhow, see The Bindon Landslip of 1839 at the Lyme Regis Museum site for the full-resolution monograph, which includes the text and ten plates, as well as a link to Thea Hawkesworth's paper Lyme’s History in Museum Objects 12: The Undercliff Model, which documents the general history and geology of the landslip via a description of William Dawson's 1841 post-slip model of the undercliff.

Via Lyme Regis Museum blog.

- Ray

Lyme Undercliff photos found!

In June 2010, Clare and I walked the Lyme Regis Undercliff - a classic if quite strenuous walk through what has been described as "the nearest thing we have to a jungle in England". But out of sheer lack of organisation, I lost most of the photos before uploading them to the associated blog post, due to an unrecoverable computer crash and failure to backup (there's a life lesson there). However, yesterday I managed to get Clare's old PC working to recover some other files, and was delighted to find the Lyme photos. See the updated post Undercliff: visited at last.

- Ray

A Sapphic leap in Dorset?

Following on from the recent post about Swinburne and chalk cliffs - see Swinburne, Culver climber - yesterday I read Thomas Hardy's poem A Singer Asleep, his elegy to Swinburne written at Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, on the occasion of Hardy's visit to Swinburne's grave there.

The poem, which celebrates Swinburne as a kindred spirit to the Greek poet Sappho, has a particular verse that refers to Sappho's alleged suicide by jumping off a "white cape", Cape Leukas (now called Cape Lefkada) out of unrequited love for a sailor called Phaon - a yarn especially propagated by Menander's mostly-lost play Leucadia (aka The Lady from Leukas). See Sappho and the Leucadian Leap (Gary Hoffman, Opera today, 18 Sep 2005) for more on this.

His singing-mistress verily was no other
Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother
Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;
Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep
Into the rambling world-encircling deep
Which hides her where none sees.

- from A Singer Asleep, Thomas Hardy

This brings me to another "white cape" at the easternmost tip of the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset; see Google Maps and this excellent aerial photo by Phil Brace. The overall formation is, as a 19th century description puts it, a broken promontory "called promiscuously Foreland, Handfast Point, and Old Harry Head". As described, with further good photos, in Dr Ian West's geological account Harry Rocks and Ballard Point, within it there are various structures including "Old Harry" and "Old Harry's Wife"; and the gap between the mainland and the first offshore rock appears on maps as "St Lucas' Leap".

"St Lucas Leap" is a name of considerable antiquity that appears on the 1580s Richards Treswell map of Studland Parish (see top right here) and, if the map is accurate, predates the collapse of the promontory into separate stacks 1. The stated origin stories reek, to me anyway, of folk etymology. The predominant one is that:

It was close by, at St. Lucas's Leap, that a pair of pedigree greyhounds belonging to a certain squire at Studland, while coursing a hare, are said to have leaped clean over the cliff and have been dashed to pieces, the name St. Lucas being afterwards given to the spot where the tragedy occurred to commemorate the name of one of the favourite hounds which perished so suddenly and tragically. It was said that the old gentleman did not long survive the disaster, as he was so greatly attached to the dog and its fortunes."
- Old Swanage or Purbeck Past and Present: A collection of articles, topographical, historical, antiquarian, biographical and anecdotal, WM Hardy, 1910

A second version, repeated in Anthony Mills' 1977 The place-names of Dorset, is that is refers to Richard Lucas, rector of Studland 1536-78.

I was interested, however, in the earliest appearance of the name in Google Books, which is Thomas Hardy's relatively early comic novel The Hand of Ethelberta.  Set partly on the Isle of Purbeck, it features several vivid descriptions of sailing past the promontory: Hardy calls the whole formation "Saint Lucas Leap" in the original 1876 Cornhill Magazine publication and the first book imprint (see the Internet Archive handofethelberta02hard). In later editions, for some reason, he revises it to the real name, "Old Harry Point".  

I think Hardy's original name gives a glimpse into his creative processes, because the novel concerns a widowed poet called Ethelberta Petherwin who is fending off several suitors.  She is a poet and writer that Hardy twice identifies with Sappho:

He lived by teaching music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived; though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with thriving he starved.  During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon.
...
‘Well, it is an old and worn argument—that about the inexpedience of tragedy—and much may be said on both sides.  It is not to be denied that the anonymous Sappho’s verses—for it seems that she is really a woman—are clever.’

This makes me strongly suspect that Hardy must have had Sappho's "Leukas leap" in mind when he upgraded "St Lucas Leap" to a full promontory.

1. It's not clear when the collapse of the Old Harry promontory happened. HB Woodward, in 1890, contains the anecdote that

"about one hundred and twenty years ago a man could creep along a narrow path from the mainland to Old Harry"- (page 78, in Swanage (Isle of  Purbeck) Its History, Resources as an Invigorating Health Resort, Botany, and Geology, John Braye, 1890).

But this is unreliable, as it appears to be recycling an 1837 anecdote that refers to an entirely different rock a little westward along the coast, The Pinnacle:

"In one place, nearly half way between Ballard Point and Old Harry, is a rock about 100 ft. high, with mould and grass on the top. It is at the bottom a square of, say, 11 yards; and there are 49 tiers of horizontal flint. I was informed that some very old men recollect that, about seventy years ago, they could creep along a narrow path out to this rock; but, about fifty years ago, it was disjoined, but scarcely any other change has taken place." - On the Strata near Swanwich, in the Isle of Purbeck, James Mitchell, page 591, Magazine of Natural History, Volume 1, 1837.

- Ray

Tamara Drewe review

I've mentioned previously Stephen Frears' film adaptation, with screenplay by Moira Buffini, of Posy Simmonds Tamara Drewe. We saw it today and highly recommend it; it was every bit up to expectations.

As is generally known, it takes its scenario loosely from Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd: the beautiful Tamara (played by Gemma Arterton) comes to the Dorset village of her childhood to initiate renovation and sale of her late mother's house. There she becomes the focus of attraction for three men: the reliable handyman and past lover Andy Cobb (Luke Evans), the adulterous author Nicholas Hardiment (Roger Allam), and the charismatic indy band drummer Ben Sergeant (Dominic Cooper) who she is interviewing.

Over the course of a year, their shifting relationships are watched by Hardiment's long-suffering wife Beth (Tamsin Greig), the weary academic Glen McCreavy (Bill Camp) and the other residents of the writers' retreat run by the Hardiments, and by two bored and mischievous village teenagers, Jody and Casey (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie). Eventually, the already tense situation is raised to boiling point by Jody - who is smitten with Ben - sending a provocative forged e-mail to all of Tamara's suitors.

The film could be described a tragicomic farce, deliciously wry rather than laugh-out-loud. The casting, locations and characterisation can't be faulted; it handles its different threads deftly; and it's tightly storyboarded from the graphic novel, except for a very effective and sympathetic change to part of the resolution. The main story is rich in Thomas Hardy book and movie allusions without being heavy-handed, from the lovely set pieces such as Ben impressing Tamara with his skill with drumsticks (just as Captain Troy impresses Bathsheba with his swordsmanship) down to the minor characters called Tess, Eustacia and Diggory.

The whole story is given greater depth by Simmonds' sharp observations of the difficult social trends of villages taken over by Yuppie culture, and of the foibles and pretensions of the writing circuit; a recurring theme, right through to the end credits (don't miss the song) is how writers recycle their experience into their works. I particularly liked the way it manages to bring a sympathetic edge to Tamara, the Bathsheba character (she could be unsufferable and too perfect, but her burden is that she is an unwitting femme fatale who evidently hasn't come to terms with her new-found attractiveness after rhinoplasty) and the way the film made Jody and Casey even more central to the story. They act both as a Hardyesque rustic Greek chorus, and as classic trickster figures - superficially disruptive, but the eventual catalysts for change and resolution.

It's hard to single any actor out as especially good, but Dominic Cooper was outstanding as the scary and charismatic Ben Sergeant, as was Jessica Barden as Jody (she did well not to get entrenched in a Coronation Street bit part). However, all concerned - author, adapters and cast - should be immensely proud of this film. Go and see it.

PS:  There's an excellent article - minor spoilers - about the genesis and making of the film in the Sony press kit.

- Ray

Undercliff: visited at last

Lyme-Axton Undercliff (crossed-eye stereopair - click to enlarge)

I mentioned the Lyme Regis Undercliff here previously (see Seaton, slips and Sabine Baring-Gould); subsequent to this, Clare and I finally walked the South West Coast Path section that runs the length of the Undercliff.

Despite the book and film of The French Lieutenant's Woman, and even the many online guides and photographs, the reality of the landscape came as quite a surprise. Created by past and ongoing landslips, the Undercliff is essentially a south-facing forested ledge around seven miles long and at most a quarter of a mile wide, bounded on one side by cliffs down to the sea and on the other by a ravine and further cliffs to landward. The underlying terrain, rumpled by the landslips, I can only describe as chaotic, a mess of ridges and deep gullies, made even more difficult to negotiate by the thick coverage of woodland and lush undergrowth that has sprung up due to the damp soil and warm microclimate. It has been described as the nearest thing Britain has to a jungle, and this was an especially accurate description when walking it on a close, hot summer afternoon. We got through a litre of water each, and could easily have done with more.

What many of the guides fail to mention is the sheer variability of the walk. The landscape varies from moment to moment between open woodland, dark gullies where nothing grows but hart's tongue ferns, and huge overgrown glades smelling of wild garlic and elderflower, with clear vistas back to crumbling chalk cliffs. The path itself switches rapidly between easy forest path (at one point even opening out into a metalled drive) and, mostly, an exhausting succession of ups and downs via slopes with slippery flints and small flights of log steps. It's definitely, as generally described, an arduous and challenging walk - but a fascinating one. See the South West Coast Path official page.

Apart from the cottage ruins and occasional cliff views, both much-photographed, it's surprisingly difficult to give a good photographic impression of the Undercliff, as much of its charm is in its deep, layered vistas. However, for those who are comfortable with crossed-eye stereopairs, the 3D pair above is an attempt.

(We walked it from the Lyme end for convenience in getting home; Exeter buses are more frequent from Seaton. However, I recommend the other direction. At the Seaton end there's a rather draggy walk via Axecliff golf course and the dismal Axton end of Seaton that you might prefer to get over with at the beginning).

So here are the photos. I'm afraid they make it look like a gentle and level woodland walk. It isn't!

Lyme - looking down to The Cobb

Looking back to The Cobb from start of Undercliff walk

The start - the obligatory "Abandon hope all ye who enter here" information board

An occasional vista of dazzling white chalkface in the landward cliff

In the mid-section, past Pinhay Bay, the path briefly becomes a easy metalled drive

The half-way point: the much-photographed ruined house

Clare

Another vista of the crags that back the Undercliff to landward

An eroded chalk pinnacle

Yet another ascent - this is steeper than it looks

And the final ascent ...

... comes out of the dense woodland ...

... giving views westward to Beer Head.

The final ascent ...

... takes us up to the golf course above Seaton ...

... and we're finally down to a blustery late afternoon on Seaton Beach with views to the chalk cliffs of Beer.

The view back from Seaton to the Undercliff

It was a strenuous but great walk. It makes an interesting comparison with the Isle of Wight Undercliff, as mentioned in the previous post The writer, the cancer-merchant, his eccentric wife, and the faux castle. Geologically the Lyme and IoW ones are very similar: landslip regions with harder rocks overlying softer clays. But the Isle of Wight Undercliff is generally broader and flatter, stabilised by a deal of Victorian landscaping. There's even a main road, Undercliff Drive, running most of its length. There are, however, two sections that approach the wildness of the Lyme Regis Undercliff. One is at the southern tip of the Island, between Niton and Blackgang - see Google Maps and On the lost road. The other is the East End landslip section between Bonchurch and Luccombe - see Google Maps. The latter particularly resembles the Lyme Undercliff, but handily compressed into a kilometre or so; see The Landslip - Bonchurch to Shanklin.

---

Addendum: see The Bindon Landslip of 1839 (26th February 2013), which links to a new Lyme Regis Museum scan of the geologists Coneybeare and Buckland's classic monograph on the landslip, an illustrated account of their visit shortly after it happened.

Addendum 2: see Undercliff - there and back again: 3D for a larger batch of 3D images taken on a revisit in August 2014.

- Ray

Seaton, slips and Sabine Baring-Gould

Further to Sidmouth and nearby, yesterday - showing the area to a friend on holiday - we took the bus to Beer, walked up and over to Seaton, then took the bus back to Sidmouth for a potter. Beautiful but rather odd day: hot sun but distinctly cold; and bright but very hazy, giving vivid near views but indistinct far ones, with a dazzle of misty headlands.

Seaton (or its eastmost end, Axmouth Harbour) is one end of the famous Axmouth-Lyme Regis landslip terrain, the Undercliff, a region bibliographically under the vast shadow of John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. However, I didn't know until recently about Winefred, a story of the chalk cliffs (Sabine Baring-Gould, 1900) which looks rather fun as a romantic melodrama ("Love, iniquity, treachery, smuggling, redemption") set around the then hamlet of Seaton. The heroine Winefred Marley is torn between twin heritages, that of her gentleman father and her smuggler mother, and the novel features a Jack Rattenbury, implied to be a son of the famous Lyme Bay smuggler Jack Rattenbury (who is called Job Rattenbury in the book). Its climactic event is the great Bindon landslip on the Christmas Eve of 1839, where a huge tract of farmland slipped to produce the feature now called Goat Island. Toward the end of the book Jane Marley, Winefred's mother, is shown something worrying by a man working near her clifftop house:

"Missus," said he, "I advise you to budge. Something is going to take place; we don't know what, and I've had orders to give you warning."

"I do not understand you."

"Come and see for yourself."

Jane followed the ganger, and he led her from the house, through the bushes, to a point on the edge of the cliff that commanded the beach and the sea some three hundred feet below.

She was silent.

No wind was stirring. The moment was that of the turn of the tide. At a distance of half a mile from the shore the surface of the water heaved like the bosom of of a sleeper in rhythmic throb. There were no rollers, no white horses.

But nearer land the sea was boiling. Volumes of muddy water surged up in bells as from a great depth, and spread in glistening sheets, that threw out wavelets which clashed with the undulations of the tide. Moreover, there appeared something like a mighty monster of the deep, ruddy brown, heaving his back above the water.

"That which is coming in is sweet water," said the man. "One of our chaps has ventured down and tasted it. It is not the fountains of the deep that are broken up, but the land springs are feeding the ocean. Did you ever witness the like?"

"Yes," said Jane, "there was something of the kind took place, but only in a small way, before the crack formed when my old cottage was ruined."

"Exactly, missus. And there is going to happen something of the same sort here, but on a mighty scale, to which that was but as nothing. Where it will begin, how far it will extend, all that is what no mortal can guess. Now you know why I have been sent to tell you to clear out as fast as you can. If you want my help, you are welcome to it."

Oo-er. And furthermore, the birds and the rabbits have deserted the cliff. But in true movie-cliche style she goes back to the house alone, locking the door behind her to pack (because she has a secret stash of gold), but who should be hiding there but the villain, the evil ferryman Olver Dench, who attacks her, packs a carpet-bag with the gold, and leaves her tied up and locked in the house. She manages to get to the window in time to see the landslip starting:

Looking out she saw Dench standing irresolute — as one dazed. She saw something more. At that moment the house swayed like a ship. The surface of the land broke up, and seemed transmuted into fluid, for in one place it heaved like a mounting billow, and in another sank like the trough of a wave. It was to Jane, peering through the little window as though she were looking at a tumbling sea through the porthole of a cabin. Again the house lurched, and so suddenly and to such an acute angle, that Jane fell from the table.

(To be concluded) - The Graphic serialisation

Sabine Baring-Gould was an interesting character. Yet another prolific - see bibiliography - but largely forgotten novelist, he combined broad antiquarian and folklore interests, such as The Book of Were-Wolves (Gutenberg EText-No. 5324) and Curious myths of the Middle Ages (Internet Archive curiousmythsofmi00bariuoft), with hymn-writing, folksong collection and, it appears, general eccentricity (as told in the story of his failing to recognise his own small daughter at a children's party). The diverse contents of his library can be seen at Devon Libraries' Sabine Baring-Gould's library at Killerton list.

Judging by the description of Winefred, a story of the chalk cliffs by Seaton Visitor Centre Trust, Baring-Gould's overall geekiness is reflected in the wealth of geological and topographic detail. As The Pall Mall Gazette review said:

He doubtless knows his public, and his public doubtless enjoys the didactic manner in which he pauses in his story to give long passages on the geological formations of the cliffs of South Devonshire, wedges of informing discourse on the history of smuggling on the south coast, instructive scraps about bacon-curing and tinder-boxes, and long string of platitudes upon the general influence of education.

- The Pall Mall Gazette (London, England), Wednesday, December 19, 1900

It's still a good yarn, though. It was serialized in The Graphic in 1899, as I managed to find via the British Library (text as usual hacked via Google Books). I'm not sure why the book isn't online in its entirety; S B-G died in 1924 so it's out of copyright.

Of related interest, William S. Baring-Gould, the prominent Sherlock Holmes scholar and analyst, was one of Baring-Gould's grandsons, so it looks as if the cataloguing fervour ran in the family.

PS: I'm pleased to say I found the resolution to the cliffhanger in The Graphic. Spectators above, including Winefred Marley, see a running figure. It's not Jane Marley, but Olver Dench, carrying the carpet-bag. He runs in terror as the landscape tears itself to pieces around him, giant fissures opening.

Rendered crazy with fear he mounted a fragment of rock and saw about him the wreckage as of a world - prostrate trees, leaning pillars of rock, disrupted masses of soil, bushes draggling over to drop into the throats open to swallow them.

Dench makes a final attempt to escape by jumping one such chasm, but can't or won't leave the heavy bag of gold:

He ran, leaped, was flying in space over the chasm, touched the rock on the farther side, caught at the grass, but was overbalanced, dragged backward from the crest by the weight of the bag, and went down with a tuft of wiry grass and hawkweed in his right hand, and disappeared in the midst of the rock and earth that was in process of being chewed. Now the carpet-bag, then a leg, next a hand appeared, and went under again. Then up came the head, only next moment to be drawn beneath and disappear in the mighty mill.

When the landslip ceases, however, amid the general devastation the house remains, damaged but still largely intact, and Jane Marley is found alive and not badly hurt. She and Winefred are reconciled, Jack Rattenbury promises to go straight and gets parental blessing to marry Winefred, and all (except the buried Dench who "has gone to his account") live ever after, happily and presumably well-informed about rotational slump processes.

You might be interested in a contemporary account:

Supposed earthquake in Dorsetshire

One of the greatest convulsions of nature ever on record, or that has taken place within the memory of man in this neighbourhood, has occcurred in Dowlands and Bending Cliffs, situated between Lyme and Axmouth harbour. Various are the opinions respecting it - some attribute it to the long-continued and heavy rains, others insisting on its being an earthquake. It certainly has every appearance of the latter. The inhabitants are no strangers to the occasional sliding of the cliffs, on this part of the coat, both east and west, but here is presented a scene of awful grandeur.

The above cliffs, which are very lofty, are about three miles west of Lyme Regis.

On Christmas Eve, Mr Chaple, the tenant of Dowland's estate, invited his workmen to the farm-house, to regale them for the evening, among whom were the occupants of four cottages, situated on the common at the foot of the cliffs. On their return home they found considerable difficulty in opening their doors, but took little noticce of it. On rising on Christmas morning they discovered a settlement of their homes; and becoming alarmed, removed their goods with all speed, and retired to Dowland's farm, about a mile on the top of the cliffs, for safety. And very providentially too; for shortly after an immense portion of the top cliffs, consisting of between forty and fify acres of arable and pasture land, with their crops, together with the common below, sunk to a depth varying from 50 to 100 feet; two of the above tenements being completely buried, whilst the other two are shattered to their very foundations. The scene presents a spectacle not easily described - gigantic rocks having been rent asunder, lofty trees buried beneath the mighty mass, with only their tops visible; large fields with their crops, separated, one part here and another there - immense precipices formed, awful chasms which appear bottomless, the whole of which strike the beholder with terror and amazement and present a striking view of the Almighty power of Him "who holds the mountains in the scales and the hills in a balance." The length of cliffs affected by this shock is more than two miles, and perhaps in breadth about one, encompassing about a thousand acres. But perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon of the whole is, that immense and ponderous rocks in front of this scene of action have been forced by the concussion from their beds, where they have reposed for ages, under the bed of the ocean beyond low water mark, and made their appearance in pyramids and different forms - in some places 40 or 50 feet above the sand, and have wonderfully formed a sort of harbour, while the beach adjoining the land remains unmoved. Boats have entered this naturally formed harbour on the eastern side, which is shallow, and found in the middle three fathoms of water. Outside the rocks thus formed, towards the sea, is about five fathoms at high water. Thousands of persons have already been to visit this extraordinary scene. No doubt but it will attract numbers of the nobility and gentry to Lyme Regis. The celebrated Pinney cliffs, which are situated betwixt Lyme and Dowlands, and which have been admired for their romantic scenery, sinks into comparative insignificance, and its lofty rocks must "hide their diminished heads" when compared with the grandeur and sublimity which Dowland's cliffs wll in future present. Dr Buckland, of Oxford, the eminent geologist, who has been residing in Lyme for some time past, has prolonged his stay, in order to explore and view the wonders of this phenomenon of nature. He states that he never witnessed anything equal to it in England. It is to be hoped that his, or some other able pen, will gratify the public by a full and proper description of the scene.

- The Hull Packet, January 10, 1840

PPS: I'm not sure why I consider Baring-Gould geeky, when (just as Katin in Samuel R Delany's Nova is a fan of moons rather than planets) I'm a fan of chines, the miniature coastal valleys of the English south coast. The majority are in the Isle of Wight, notably the now-lost Blackgang Chine, but Seaton in East Devon has one - Seaton Chine - whose foot is occupied by a cafe at the western end of its esplanade. But about 100 yards to the west, a flight of steps leads up from the beach to a fenced-off deeply-incised stream valley that I can't find in any accounts but surely deserves to count as a minor chine. See Google Maps: Seaton Chine and its cafe are at the right; the second chine is to the left. The dark shape is the shadow of a knife-edged section of cliff created by erosion between the sea and the stream, which runs almost parallel to the coast at this point.

PPPS: Winefred; a story of the chalk cliffs is now on the Internet Archive (ID winefredstoryofc00bari).

- Ray