178 REPORT ON THE AGRICULTURE OF PERTHSHIRE. 



no doubt that, in consequence of this strong faith on their part, 

 they bestowed much care in the working of their fallow, and 

 they manured it heavily with such dung as they had, and 

 which has been already described ; and they further gave it 

 frequently a good dressing of lime, a practice which, we may 

 observe, has gone sadly out of use in the Carse. For the pur- 

 pose of growing a good crop of wheat on land in an undrained 

 state, it is hard to say whether a liberal supply of this extremely 

 long undecomposed dung may not have had as good effect as 

 richer and shorter dung. The latter would no doubt have fed 

 the land better, but the long unrotted straw kept the heavy 

 clays opener than the other would have done, and it thereby 

 admitted the heat and air to the roots of the plant. The 

 benefit was more of a mechanical nature to the land than nutri- 

 tive to the plant. It enabled the land to give off a heavier crop, 

 but did not supply it with much that that crop was to be fed by. 

 Be that as it may, a well- wrought and well-dunged fallow not 

 only got a good crop of wheat, but told on many of the sub- 

 sequent crops. The last of the series of restorative crops was 

 the grass ; and with regard to that, our predecessors had fallen on 

 better times than ours, or their success in growing grass may 

 have operated to our disadvantage ; for it is notorious that at that 

 time farmers seldom failed in growing a heavy crop of clover 

 with the ryegrass, and in getting a good second cutting to keep 

 their horses and milk cows after the hay was gone. These rich 

 crops of clover, and the bulbous roots they produced and left in 

 the land, had more to do with maintaining its fertility than all 

 the dung that was applied throughout the rotation. The value 

 of a good crop of clover in the grass has been known at all times, 

 and it has always been regarded as the precursor of good crops 

 throughout the whole rotation that succeeded it. Such being 

 the case, it is difficult to estimate the loss to farmers by the 

 failure of clover, as they lose not only in the weight and value of 

 their hay crop and the aftermath, but in the condition and pro- 

 ductive power of the land in the succeeding years. The farmer 

 had no fear of what is now called clover sickness, and he could 

 calculate on an abundant crop of clover with the ryegrass. He 

 cut both for hay, and seems never to have thought that his doing 

 so was exhausting the land to the prejudice of a succeeding 

 generation. 



Since that date, forty years ago, potatoes began to be shipped 

 extensively from Scotland to the London market, and the twenty 

 years succeeding were the epoch of the Perthshire reds. They 

 were soon largely grown on the black land of the Carse, and 

 generally throughout the county. It was found, of course, that 

 to grow them successfully, more and better dung was required 

 than the long wetted straw that had hitherto passed under the 



