Dry valley

A dry valley may be developed on many kinds of permeable rock, such as limestone and chalk, or sandy terrains that do not regularly sustain surface water flow. Such valleys do not hold surface water because it sinks into the permeable bedrock.

There are many examples of chalk dry valleys along the North and South Downs in southern England. Notably the National Trust-owned Devil's Dyke near Brighton covers some 200 acres (0.81 km²) of downland scarp, and includes the deepest dry valley in the world - created when melting water eroded the chalk downland to the permafrost layer after the last ice age. The three-quarter mile long curved dry valley is around 700 feet (210 m) in height and attracts tourists with its views of Sussex, Hampshire and Kent.

Other examples include the Alkham Valley near Dover, and the Hartley Bottom and Fawkham valleys near Dartford in north Kent.

There are many examples of limestone dry valleys in the Peak District and the Yorkshire Wolds. A notable example is the valley of the River Manifold which is dry, except in spate, from Wetton south for several miles.

Dry Valley (novel)

Dry Valley (Russian: Суходол, pronounced: Sukhodo′l) is a short novel by a Nobel Prize-winning Russian author Ivan Bunin, first published in the April 1912 issue of the Saint Petersburg Vestnik Evropy magazine. Having come out soon after The Village (1910), it is usually linked to the latter as the author's second major book concerning the bleak state of Russia as a whole and its rural community in particular. It is also regarded as the last in Bunin's early 1900s cycle of "gentry elegies".

History

Bunin started working upon the book in summer 1911, when at the Vasilyevsky estate in Orlovskaya gubernia. In September of this year he wrote to the Moskovskaya Vest correspondent: "I've just finished the first part of a large novelet called Dry Valley". The work was finished in December 1911 on Capri where Bunin stayed at his friend Maxim Gorky's home. On February 21 he read it to the host and another visiting guest, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky. Both praised the book, the latter compared it to "an old tapestry."