2-913-944 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Banks of the Alma, 1854. Crimean War. 'The Alma is a tortuous little stream, which has worked its way down through a red clay soil, deepening its course as it proceeds seawards, and which drains the steppe-like lands on its right bank, making at times pools and eddies too deep to be forded...Along the right or north bank of the Alma are a number of Tartar houses, at times numerous and close enough to form a cluster of habitations deserving the name of a hamlet; at times scattered wide apart amid little vineyards, surrounded by walls of mud and stone of three feet in height. The bridge over which the post road passes from Bouljanak to Sebastopol runs close to one of these hamlets...At the left or south side of the Alma the ground...recedes for a few yards at a moderate height above the stream, pierced here and there by the course of the winter's torrents, so as to form small ravines...'. From "Illustrated London News", 1854.