OBSERVATIONS.
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OBSERVATIONS. ' I love thee, Nature, as a child Loves the dear M o t h e r that beguil'd Its many tedious hours of pain, And soothed it into health again.' J. W . Douglas (Ent. Mag. 1838, 257).
every part of Suffolk are to be found lanes, now transmogrified into ugly tarred roads, that are of distinctly lower level than the land on either side ; in sandy districts these are just as often flat, but wherever they occur on clay it will be noticed that only upon a slope, and the steeper the incline the higher are the banks, do such sunk ways occur. There is, for example, a short and sharp rise in Monks Soham (locally ' Big Hill,' though solely by comparison) from a brook that trickles in winter through Poplar Meadow, though no poplars have grown there since at latest 1892, on the east to Hollow Lane, now a mere foot-path on the west; and this rise is ten feet below the flanking land-level, but towards both extremities the lateral altitude gradually decreases tili on the crest the sides are on a plane with the road. Local folk believe the hill to have been cut away by their forbears; but it is, I am sure, perfectly obviously the result of a thousand years' wear and tear by foot-sloggers and farm-carts, ably backed, when some slight depression had at first been thus hollowed, by the washings of rain which could not move clay but easily disintegrates the modicum of sand here mixed with the clay, just as both sun and frost do in the case of its chalk-nodules. Gilbert White's fifth Letter similarly accounts for sunk ways in Hants and I have somewhere seen a note by H . B. Woodward that ascribes similar phenomena to Norfolk. Tracts excavated on the level fall into an entirely distinct category, for here only two causes seem available. Firstly one has the slight lateral thrust of ordinary traffic ; but when the banks rise more than a foot one must, in view of the levelling counterthrust of wind, suppose artificial excavation was exercised at some remote period. Such sandy hollows have been very largely obliterated by the plough and felling of their retaining hedges, but are still conspicuous about at least the Gisleham pit and Frostenden brick-fields, both on Pleistocene gravel underlain by brick-earth. Why and at what period they should have been dug out is matter for the archaist. O U R S U N K LANES.—In