button to main menu  Gents Mag 1760 p.522
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Gentleman's Magazine 1760 p.522
where it run with the greatest rapidity at the foot of the mountain.
The effects of the brooks of Hopebeck and Habcorton need not to be so particularly described, being of the same kind with the other, only inferior in degree, both on account of their being swelled by one of the spouts only, & their channels being deeper. However, the damage done by those, tho' inferior to the other, was by no means inconsiderable. One circumstance relative to that of Hopebeck may perhaps deserve to be mentioned: having burst its banks just at the place of crossing the highway, it continued its course along a lane to a considerable distance before it found a passage into the fields; and when the brook subsided, and the supply failed, much water remained stagnant in the hollows of the lane, particularly one before the door of a house, situated on the road. At this the people, not knowing how it could possibly come there, were greatly surprized; but much more, when they found in it a very fine dish of trout.
With regard to the physical cause of this uncommon phaenomenon, there are some circumstances preceding it which seem irrenconcileable with either of the two theories I have seen. The cause assigned in the first theory, viz. various and contrary winds, could not be the real cause, as there was very little wind all the day preceding the event; what there was came constantly from the same quarter, and it entirely ceased in the evening. Neither was there more probability in the other cause's operation, viz. an extraordinary rarefraction of the air by igneous meteors, as there was not the least lightning seen, or thunder heard, nor any other diagnostic of the atmosphere's being charged with a more than ordinary stock of sulphureous exhalations, and nitrous acids at that time.
ROB. DIXON.
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