THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



183 



of my own was not seen from the end of July 

 until the following March. " On the same very 

 nationally important subject there is also a valuable 

 paper by Mr. John Henderson (i6trf, vol. xiv., p. 

 129), on the drainage of the valleys of the Rye 

 and Derwent, for which an act of Parliament was 

 obtained. It is an excellent account of a once 

 bad state of affairs, and their remedy, which may 

 be studied with advantage by the landowners 

 of many portions of our islands ; for how many 

 extensive and fertile valleys are there, the drainage 

 of which is confined entirely to sluggish, mean- 

 dering streams, upon which, at every few feet of 

 fall, there stands a corn-mill of perhaps only a 

 few horses' power, the total value of which in fee 

 simple is not worth as much as the amount of the 

 damage which is occasionally done by a single 

 flood, letting alone the permanent injury which is 

 occasioned by the damming up of the outfall, in 

 preventing the drainage of the surrounding land. 

 In the case of the Rye and Derwent valleys, the 

 water-mills which obstructed the drainage were 

 removed, or changed to steam-mills, at a cost 

 equal to £289 5s. 8d. per horse power, the entire 

 cost being — 



Cost of steam engines , £3,500 



The fee simple of maintaining them 13,382 5 

 Compensation for damage done to 



mills, &c 3,367 15 



£20,250 



Of the advantage of this outlay, Mr. Henderson 

 adds, "I do not think I say too much when I 

 affirm, that I have known one flood do more 

 damage to crops and tilth, if fairly valued, than 

 the whole sum expended under this act." 



It was in 1859 that in an able address to the 

 Central Farmers' Club, Mr. Algernon Clarke 

 again returned to the subject. He then made an 

 onslaught on the river dams, and other impedi- 

 ments; an attack which their owners will never 

 attempt to answer. In alluding to the fertilizing 

 effect upon meadows of the matters commonly 

 deposited on them by the flood waters, he observed 

 {Farmer s Magazine, vol. 1. p. 257) " that the 

 bulk of coarse hay furnished by marginal 

 meadows, without asking any return of manure, 

 does render them of considerable value to the up- 

 land farms with which they aie commonly asso- 

 ciated, is perfectly true ; but it is also the fact 

 that this value is hazardous and precarious, owing 

 to the capricious irrigation or sedimentary ma- 

 nuring of the stream that may serve as your Nile ; 

 so that if one year you get a fair pasture, in another 

 it is too watery to be grazed. If for one or more 

 years (according to locality) your hay-harvest is 

 successful, the next season utterly spoils your 



crop, leaving also a gritty aftermath that stock 

 cannot relish. The farmers in the Trent valley 

 by the Ouse, Nene, Thames, or Severn, in the 

 rainiest as well as the drier counties, are pretty 

 well agreed in declaring that while the small winter 

 floods compensate for any damage they may do 

 by the cheap manures they leave behind, the 

 great floods of wet seasons inflict very heavy 

 injury by hanging upon the land." 



And then as to the sanitary effects of these 

 lengthened floods, he well described the result of 

 many laborious observations when he added, 

 " But the evil effects of river-floods are not only 

 agricultural ; for, in the neighbourhood of towns^ 

 just where the meadows may be rented as 'ac- 

 commodation land ' at £2 or £3 or more per acre 

 (and the proprietors might therefore doubt the 

 advantage of drying them), sanitary considerations 

 demand our care. Evei'y man thinks his own 

 home peculiarly healthy, until the Registrar-General 

 dispels the pleasing illusion, and the tabular sta- 

 tistics of public health prove most undeniably 

 that districts abutting upon a flooding river, or 

 intersected with marshy hollows and choked rivu- 

 lets, are above all others (excepting crowded and 

 filthy cities) the haunts of fever and glandular 

 disease. Thus Northampton, on the sluggish 

 Nene, which overtops its banks, held up as a navi- 

 gation, and pounded back by mill after mill along 

 its winding course, is shown by the * returns ' to 

 be one of the few most deadly places in England ; 

 and typhoid and milder but enfeebling maladies 

 constantly visit the villages that inhale the hot- 

 weather malaria of the swampy meadows. The 

 Ouse has a like unhealthy character, as shown by 

 the excessive rate of mortality in Buckingham- 

 shire, Huntingdonshire, &c.; and, indeed, so have 

 all our gloomy and lifeless rivers, as exemplified 

 at Norwich, surrounded by the heavily-flowing 

 Wensum and Yare — at Colchester, on the dull 

 and tardy Colne — at Salisbury and the fashionable 

 Bath, on the inactive and cheerless Avon ; and 

 the smaller towns and parishes flanking the 

 streams are the hotbeds of intermittent fever, 

 rheumatic and Hver complaints, and scrofulous and 

 pulmonary disorders, aggravated if not originated 

 by the cold damps and poisonous exhalations from 

 which the inhabitants have no means of escape. 

 Trunk drainage, however, would prove a mar- 

 vellous preventive. I am informed that at the 

 village of Cople, in Bedfordshire, the Duke of 

 Bedford cut a deep brook which relieved the parish 

 of stagnant water, and although up to that time 

 typhus fever was rarely out of the parish, only 

 a single case has since happened in a period of 

 eight years." 



It would be very desirable if, by some general 



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