Ingham, Suffolk

Description
Ingham, a parish in Suffolk, 4 miles N of Bury St Edmunds railway station. It has a post and telegraph office under Bury St Edmunds; money order office, Bury St Edmunds. Acreage, 1830; population, 292. The living is a rectory, united with the rectories of Culford and Timwortb, in the diocese of Ely; net value, £423. The church, which was rebuilt in 1861, is a building of flint and stone in the Early English style. Ingleborough, a mountain in the W.R. Yorkshire, 8 miles NW by N of Settle. It rises from a base of at least 30 miles in circuit, and attains an altitute of 2361 feet above sea-level. Its skirts consist largely of morass. Its substance is chiefly limestone and grit. Its sides are cut with deep chasms, and pierced with deep funnel-shaped cavities. Several streamlets rise on its shoulders and fall into its crevices. Its summit is a tableau of about a mile in circuit, was a beacon station in the Roman and the Saxon times; took thence the name of Ingle-borough, which signifies " the station of fire;" has vestiges of an ancient British camp of about 15 acres, inclosing traces of nineteen horse-shoe-shaped huts; was crowned about 1820 by a tower, called a Hospice, now in a ruinous condition; is . generally wreathed in mists or clouds, but on a clear day forms a prominent feature throughout a great extent of country, and commands a panoramic view to the Craven Hills, Snowdonia, the Irish Sea, Scaw Fell, Helvellyn, and Cross Fell. Ingleborough Cave, at the S skirt of the mountain, about 1 1/2 mile from Clapham, is one of the most magnificent caverns in the kingdom, and may be reached either from Clapham railway station or Clapham village, through the grounds of Ingleborough House, and is approached by a glen overhung by lofty, precipitous, creviced hills. It pierces a vast limestone precipice; is entered by a low wide arch; consists for about 600 feet of a mere tunnel, with a height of from 15 to 5 feet; expands then into a spacious chamber, with surface all elaborated in a manner resembling the work of a Gothic cathedral, in limestone formations of endless variety of form and size; and proceeds thence into a series of chambers, corridors, and recesses, first made accessible in 1838, said to have an aggregate extent of about 2000 feet, and displaying a marvellous and most beautiful variety of stalactites and stalagmites. A streamlet runs through the whole, and helps to give purity to the air. An opening into the cave from the upper ground is at a chasm called Gaping Gill Hole, near the route of the ordinary ascent of the mountain, and here a streamlet falls into the cave in what must be a very profound abyss.