But characteristic as Great Chart, Bethersden and High Halden are of this strange wealden county, they do not express it, sum it up and dominate it as does Tenterden Town, some two or three miles to the south of High Halden.

And this was so not because the Weald was an impassable forest of woodland and undergrowthit was never that; but because of its scarcity of water or more accurately its uncertainty of water and its soil, the Wealden clay.

The history of this great Wealden island to the south-east of us is obscure enough; but a few general facts, which bear upon our gravel- pit, I can give you.

I must begin, however, ages before the Wealden island existed; when the chalk of which its mass was composed was at the bottom of a deep ocean.

The Plastic clay and sands were deposited during a period of earthquake, of upheaval and subsidence of ancient lands; and therefore of violent currents and flood waves, seemingly rushing down from, or round the shores of that Wealden island to the south of us, on the shore of which island Odiham once stood.