Witness hill

A witness hill is a landform that stands as testimony to the evolution and retreat of a plateau or cuesta relief, formed where horizontal layers of hard and soft rock are exposed to erosion. As rivers wear away the softer rock, isolated hills are left behind, and where a plateau erodes from multiple directions at once these hills typically keep flat summits, so that each hill stands as a remnant, a witness, of the more extensive plateau that covered the area millions of years earlier. Witness hills are especially associated with sedimentary basins and tabular relief, notably Spain's Meseta Central, with other examples recorded in North Carolina, Burkina Faso, Venezuela and Algeria.