The Forest of Vazon

The Forest of Vazon

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Title: The Forest of Vazon A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: December 28, 2004 [EBook #14501]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE FOREST OF VAZON
A GUERNSEY LEGEND OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY.
London: HARRISON & SONS, 59, PALL MALL Booksellers to the
Queen and H.R.H the Prince of Wales 1889.

PREFACE.
Nothing authentic is known of the history of Guernsey previously to its
annexation to the Duchy of Normandy in the tenth century. The only

sources of information as to events which may have occurred before
that date are references in monkish chronicles of the usual
semi-mythical type, and indications conveyed by cromlechs and
menhirs, fragments of Celtic instruments and pottery, and a few Roman
relics. It is unfortunate that we are thus precluded from acquiring any
knowledge of the development of a people as to whom the soundest
among conflicting conjectures seems to be that, coming originally from
Brittany, they preserved the purity of the Celtic race through periods
when in other offshoots of the same stock its characteristics were being
obliterated by the processes of crossing and absorption.
If early local records had existed they would hardly have failed to have
given minute details of the convulsion of nature which resulted in the
destruction by the sea of the forest lands on the northern and western
sides of the island, and in the separation of tracts of considerable
magnitude from the mainland. Geologists are agreed in assigning to
this event the date of March, 709, when great inundations occurred in
the Bay of Avranches on the French coast; they are not equally
unanimous as to the cause, but science now rejects the theory of a
raising of the sea-level and that of a general subsidence of the island.
The most reasonable explanation appears to be that the overpowering
force of a tidal wave suddenly swept away barriers whose resistance
had been for ages surely though imperceptibly diminishing, and that the
districts thus left unprotected proved to be below the sea-level--owing,
as regards the forests, to gradual subsidence easily explicable in the
case of undrained, swampy soil; and, as regards the rocks, to the fact
that the newly exposed surface consisted of accumulations of already
disintegrated deposits.
It is unquestionable that before the inroad of the sea the inlet in the
south-west of the island known as Rocquaine Bay was enclosed by two
arms, the northern of which terminated in the point of Lihou; on which
still stand the ruins of an old priory, while the southern ended in the
Hanois rocks, on which a lighthouse has been erected. Lihou is at
present an island, accessible only at low water by a narrow causeway;
the Hanois is entirely cut off from the shore, but it is a noteworthy fact
that the signs of old cart-ruts are visible at spring tides, and that an iron
hook was recently discovered attached to a submerged rock which had
apparently served as a gatepost; besides these proofs of the existence of

roads now lying under the waves, it is said that an old order for the
repair of Hanois roads is still extant. That Vazon and the Braye du
Valle were the sites of forests is indisputable, though the former is now
a sandy bay into which the Atlantic flows without hindrance, and the
latter, reclaimed within the present century by an enterprising governor,
formed for centuries a channel of the sea by which the Clos du Valle,
on which the Vale Church stands, was separated from the mainland. A
stratum of peat extends over the whole arm of the Braye, while as
regards Vazon there is the remarkable evidence of an occurrence which
took place in December, 1847. A strong westerly gale, blowing into the
bay concurrently with a low spring tide, broke up the bed of peat and
wood underlying the sand and gravel, and lifted it up like an ice-floe; it
was then carried landwards by the force of the waves. The inhabitants
flocked to the spot, and the phenomenon was carefully inspected by
scientific observers. Trunks of full-sized trees were seen, accompanied
by meadow plants and roots of rushes and weeds, surrounded by those
of grasses and mosses; the perfect state of the trees showed that they
had been