Confirmation of this alteration of their courses by streams is afforded when we cut a main drain through one of these meadows, to carry the water from the connected furrow drains of adjoining arable land.  The alluvial soil can be found as deep as the depth of the present brook, free from the stones found in the arable land, and containing, to the same depth as the brook, fresh water shells similar to those in the brook to-day.  There was a bend in course of formation in one of my brooks, where the stump of a tree, whose fall was the starting-point, could be seen standing in the newly-formed ground, a yard or more from the stream when I left, though I can remember when it was so near as almost to touch the water.

If we form an S from a piece of wire, and pinch it together from top to bottom, the loops become so flattened, [S], that one of them may almost unite with the central curve.  The same thing often happens in the loops of a brook, and, in time, the stream will complete the junction, forming a short circuit.[2] Thus an island may be formed; or when the old loop opposite the short circuit gets filled up with deposit or falling banks—­the water preferring the short circuit—­a piece of land may be cut off from one of the former sides of the brook and transferred to the other, so that where the brook is a boundary between two owners or parishes one owner or parish may be robbed and the other owner or parish becomes a receiver of stolen goods.  There was an instance of this on the farm I owned and occupied adjoining the Aldington Manor property, and the owner and the tenant of the piece transferred to my side could not reach it without walking through the brook.  In this case, however, the tenant had wisely planted the ground with withies, which he managed to get at for lopping when its turn came round every seven years.  Thus we have an example of the necessity of the ancient practice of beating the bounds, which, at least before the days of ordnance surveys, was not merely an opportunity for a holiday.

Another proof of the creation of new land by the meanderings of a stream is found in the ancient “carrs” of North Lincolnshire, near Brigg, where the hollowed-out logs of black bog oak, which formed the canoes of the ancient inhabitants, are sometimes discovered many feet below the surface, and long distances from the present course of the Ancholme.  These having sunk to the bottom of the river in past ages, and gradually become covered with alluvium, were left behind as the river changed its course.  In some cases however these canoes may have sunk to the bottom of the water when it formed a lake, and the lake having gradually silted up, the river receded to something like its present width.

The floods in the Vale of Evesham from the Avon and even from my brooks, often converted the adjoining flat meadows into lakes, and they rose so suddenly after heavy rains or the melting of deep snowfalls on the hills, that they were attended with danger to the stock.