Devastation by Earthquake

I went, by moderate stages, from Liverpool to Madeley where I arrived on Friday, 9. The next morning we went to see the effects of the late earthquake; such it undoubtedly was. On Monday, 27, at four in the morning, a rumbling noise was heard, accompanied with sudden gusts of wind and wavings of the ground. Presently the earthquake followed, which shook only the farmer's house and removed it entire about a yard, but carried the barn about fifteen yards and then swallowed it up in a vast chasm. It tore the ground into numberless chasms, large and small; in the large, threw up mounts, fifteen or twenty feet high; it carried a hedge, with two oaks, above forty feet, and left them in their natural position. It then moved under the bed of the river; which, making more resistance, received a ruder shock, being shattered in pieces, and heaved up about thirty feet from its foundations. By throwing this and many oaks into its channel, the Severn was quite stopped up and constrained to flow backward, till, with incredible fury, it wrought itself a new channel. Such a scene of desolation I never saw. Will none tremble when God thus terribly shakes the earth? 

The Journal of John Wesley