It appears that this huge
fragment, being perhaps sapped and undermined by waters,
foundered, and was engulfed, going down in a perpendicular
direction; for a gate which stood in the field, on the top of the hill,
after sinking with its posts for thirty or forty feet, remained in so
true and upright a position as to open and shut with great
exactness, just as in its first situation. Several oaks also are still
standing, and in a state of vegetation, after taking the same
desperate leap. 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 unincumbered;
but would have been buried in heaps of rubbish, had the fragment
parted and fallen forward. About an 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 farm-
house, in which lived a labourer and his family; and, just by, a
stout new barn. The cottage was inhabited by an old woman and
her son and his wife.
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