Portal:Hampshire/Selected article/23
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The Hampshire Basin is a geological syncline in southern England underlying parts of Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Dorset, and Sussex. Like the London Basin to the northeast, it consists of an area of sands and clays of Paleocene and younger age surrounded by a broken rim of chalk hills of Cretaceous age.
The basin includes areas of forest and heath including Wareham Forest, Arne and the New Forest and the large south coast settlements of Bournemouth, Southampton and Portsmouth. The Hampshire Basin has no single dominant river. In former times the Frome and Solent rivers would have drained much of the basin from east to west, fed by tributaries flowing from the north and south. Today the western part of the basin drains via the rivers Frome and Piddle into Poole Harbour, and via the Stour and Avon directly to the English Channel. The central part drains into the Solent (directly or via via Southampton Water), through the Lymington River, Test, Itchen, Meon, Hamble, Western Yar, Medina and Eastern Yar. The eastern part of the basin is a narrow coastal plain draining into the many harbours via small streams, and is crossed by larger rivers draining the Weald including the Arun and Adur.
