The Natural History of Selborne

Floods out in several parts of the kingdom, & much hay & corn destroyed. Young buzzards follow their dams with a piping, wailing noise.

Do left us.  Flood at Gracious street.

A cellar in the back-street Faringdon is full of water.

Vast damage done in various parts of the kingdom by thunder-storms & floods, from Yorkshire all across to Plymouth.

Reared the roof of my new building.

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On July 29 such vast rains fell about Iping, Bramshot, Haslemere, &c. that they tore vast holes in the turnpike-roads, covered several meadows with sand, & silt, blowed-up the heads of several ponds, carryed away part of the country-bridge at Iping, & the garden walls of the paper mill, & endangered the mill & house.  A paper-mill near Haselmere was ruined, & many 100 ae damaage sustained.  Much hay was sewpt away down the rivers, & some lives were lost.  A post-boy was drowned near Haselmere, & an other as he was passing from Farnham to Alton: the Gent: in the chaise saved himself by swimming.  These torrents were local; for at Lewes, which lies about the middle of the country of Sussex, they had a very wet time, but experienced none of these devastations.

Pond-heads are blown-up: & roads torn by the torrents.  Great flood at Gracious street.  Several mills are damaged.  Hay drowned.  Finished the walls of my new parlor.

The tortoise in Mrs Snooke’s garden went under ground Novr 21: came-out on the 30th for one day, & retired to the same hole lies in a wet border in mud & mire!  with it’s back bare.  In the late floods the water at Houghton ran over the clappers, & at Bramber into men’s ovens.

Ground to be levelled is under water.  Wood-cocks pretty common.  The country all in a flood.

Snipes leave the moors & marshes which are flooded, & get up into the uplands.

A most astonishing, & destructive flood at Newcastle on Tyne.