From Robert Chambers to William Kemp   19 December 1846

Dear Sir,

I beg to thank you very cordially for your communication received last night. Your observations on the terraces of the Tweed are very satisfactory so far, and give me to hope that, when I can visit your district and bring them into a comparison with what I have seen elsewhere, I shall be able to make a curious reading of them. It is a pity that you are just above the scope of my own observations in Lothian and elsewhere; had you been as minutely particular about Kelso, we should have probably found many coincidences. It is remarkable, however, as to your beach of 395 feet, that I have found one Fragment, south from Dalkeith, which I had set down as about 383, a discrepancy not greater than what variations of observation may account for—one person sometimes measuring to the front or lower edge of a terrace, another further in, and so forth. The difference here is within the range of a tidal flow.

From what you say of the height of Kelso Abbey, I have no doubt that that town stands on the upper or most inland part of the Paxton plateau, which we have found to be 108 feet or so above the sea level. It would be interesting to search for the final termination of it as it melts into the higher grounds. Certainly, in the first goo⁠⟨⁠d⁠⟩⁠ weather of the year, I shall have the district examined for this among other purposes. Your St Boswell’s plateau, if 278 feet, corresponds, not to anything I have yet found in Berwickshire (you were thinking of the 173 feet beach at Ladykirk), but to the plateau of that height (278) in Mid Lothian—which tells in an indentation on the High Street of Edinburgh, at St Giles’s church.

Trusting that you will yet from time to time, as convenience and weather may serve, prosecute these investigations, I should meanwhile feel much obliged for a few jottings of heights along Tweedside from Mr Kinghorn’s survey, between Kelso and the head upper part of Peeblesshire. Just jottings would supply me with starting points for measurement, if I should go to any part of the district before I see you.

Believe me your | much obliged humble serv^t | R. Chambers.