English earthquakes
By alice | October 13, 2009
Glastonbury Tor
I was helping Daughter with her homework the other day, on the subject of British earthquakes. You would not believe the weird and wonderful subjects kids get set for their homework these days, now we all have internets… back in my day, on a subject like that, there would have been one sentence in a book in the library about something completely unrelated (Nice rambles in Yorkshire or something) so you couldn’t possibly find that book anyway, but if someone passed on a rumour that the sentence was in it, just maybe you would, and then have to trawl right through every page to find the reference, except that someone else would have borrowed the book for the next three weeks anyway. And that’s if you were lucky.
Anyway, there are some informational gems to discover on the subject of British earthquakes, perhaps because the very old kind of history tends to reflect how people used to see the world in the olden days, or just because Britain is so cute.** For instance, despite having lived nearish and walked up it once, I did not know that the tower on top of Glastonbury Tor is a partially rebuilt section of a church that was destroyed in an earthquake in 1275. Also I did not know about the Dover Straits earthquake of 1580, when one person died, which is mentioned by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. Then there was the Colchester earthquake of 1884, also called The Great English Earthquake, which may have killed up to ten people, and caused a huge amount of damage, estimated at ten thousand pounds. Which wasn’t that much, even in 1884- as usual, the poor people’s houses all went down first.
But my favourite earthquake is the Dogger Bank earthquake of 1931, Britain’s strongest ever earthquake on the Richter scale, scoring an impressive 6.1. The epicentre was actually 60 miles out to sea, so the damage does not reflect our Richter superscore. One woman died from a heart attack, but other than that apparently things weren’t too bad, if the wikipedia entry is an accurate reflection- the Englishness of is this is just a joy:
The town of Filey in Yorkshire was worst hit with the spire of a church being twisted by the tremor. Chimneys collapsed in Hull, Beverley and Bridlington, and Flamborough Head suffered crumbling of parts of its cliffs. Rather less seriously, in London the head of the waxwork of Dr Crippen at Madame Tussauds fell off.
Brilliant.
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