ABSTRACT
The history of the English landscape in the last fifty million years is largely the history of its rivers. The older rivers run along the original slope of the flat surface, the newer ones along the softer beds. For example the lower Severn and the Warwickshire Avon run through soft soils, and almost meet the Welland and the Soar, a tributary of the Trent, in the centre of England. The same kind of thing has happened on a smaller scale in Wales and in Yorkshire. The Swale, Ure, and other rivers used to flow eastward into the North Sea over what are now the chalk wolds. There is plenty of evidence that what are now arms of the sea in western Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall, were once river valleys. There is a good deal of support for this theory. Thus if one walk along the Cotswold's, will find dry gaps at the heads of the Evenlode, Windrush, and Colne valleys.
