186
ON SOME RECENT SUBSIDENCES
subterranean workings, apparently akin to those here described. And
a subsidence, almost certainly resulting from the existence of another
Chalk-well below, appeared in August, 1888, in the middle of the
road between "Chalk Pit Farm" and the "Lodge," Stifford, and was
at once filled up. If we turn to the Report on the Denehole Explora-
tions (Essex Naturalist, vol. i, p. 248), we learn that Mr. R.
Meeson, at a meeting of the Royal Archaeological Institute in 1869,
mentioned that deep cavities known as "daneholes" existed in every
field in the neighbourhood of Grays Thurrock, below which there
was a substratum of Chalk. Mr. Meeson does not give the exact
position of any of these pits, though he states that on opening one of
them he found it full of Roman burial vases, which had been crushed
by the fall of the roof. But his description both of the nature of
these pits and their positions in fields "with a substratum of chalk,"
shows that he had in view excavations such as caused these subsi-
dences. At the time when the Denehole Exploration Report was
written it was impossible to be certain whether the term "sub-
stratum" had been used accurately or vaguely by Mr. Meeson,
whose general description of the pits is excessively loose and unsatis-
factory. It is much to be wished that every local observer would
note carefully the positions of excavations, subsidences, &c., on a
map of the largest scale he can procure, in order to prevent the need
of any speculations about simple matters of fact. The evidence
afforded by a map must always be valuable, whether the conclusions
of the writer of the accompanying paper receive support or the
reverse from the more enlarged experience of succeeding generations.
But could the fact be established that the pit containing the
Roman burial vases was within quarter of a mile of, and precisely
similar in character to, that below our subsidences, it by no means
follows that the two are of the same antiquity. Nevertheless, when
we consider that two of these subsidences have shown themselves
very close to one road, while a third appeared in the middle of
another, and that these Chalk-wells must almost necessarily be older
than the large, open, disused Chalk-pits near them, the most probable
inference seems to be that they are almost certainly one century old,
and that many of them may be of much greater age. We have thus,
in this neighbourhood, ancient pits of the Chalk-well class, as well as
examples, at Hangman's Wood, of the very dissimilar Deneholes.
It would be, indeed, interesting to know whether we had in the
Roman-vases pit an example of a third class of excavation, that of