sandstones known as the Hastings Beds emerges steeply, and reaches in
the centre an elevation of 796 ft. at Crowborough Beacon. It is on the
whole a region with few streams, and a considerable portion of the
ancient woodland still remains in Ashdown Forest. The greater part of
the Forest Ridges is almost without inhabitants. Towns are found only
round the edge bordering the Weald Clay, such as Tonbridge, Tunbridge
Wells and Horsham; and along the line where it is cut off by the sea,
e.g. Hastings and St Leonards. The broad low tongue of Romney Marsh
running out to Dungeness is a product of shore-building by the Channel
tides, attached to the Wealden area, but not essentially part of it.
_The London Basin._--The London Basin occupies a triangular depression
in the Chalk which is filled up with clays and gravels of Tertiary and
later age. It extends from the eastern extremity of Wiltshire in a
widening triangle to the sea, which it meets along an irregular line
from Deal to Cromer. It thus occupies parts of Wiltshire, Hampshire,
Surrey, Kent, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, the whole of Middlesex, the
county of London and Essex, and the eastern edge of Suffolk and
Norfolk. The scenery is quiet in its character, but the gravel hills
are often prominent features, as at Harrow and in the northern suburbs
of London; the country is now mainly under grass or occupied with
market and nursery gardens, and many parts, of which Epping Forest is
a fine example, are still densely wooded, the oak being the prevailing
tree. The coast is everywhere low and deeply indented by ragged and
shallow estuaries, that of the Thames being the largest. Shallow
lagoons formed along the lower courses of the rivers of Norfolk have
given to that part of the country the name of the Broads, a district
of low and nearly level land. Apart from the huge area of urban and
suburban London, the London Basin has few large towns. Norwich and
Ipswich, Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Harwich and Colchester may be mentioned
in the north-eastern part, all depending for their prosperity on
agriculture or on the sea; and a fringe of summer resorts on the low
coast has arisen on account of the bracing climate. Reading and
Windsor lie in the western portion, beyond the suburban sphere of
London. The Bagshot Beds in the west form infertile tracts of sandy
soil, covered with heath and pine, where space is available for the
great camps and military training-grounds round Aldershot, and for the
extensive cemeteries at Woking. The London Clay in the east is more
fertile and crowded with villages, while the East Anglian portion of
the basin consists of the more recent Pliocene sands and gravels,
which mix with the boulder clay to form the best wheat-growing soil in
the country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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