488 Farming of Warioickshire. 



sively and less effectually by a drain cut under the hills parallel 

 with them at about 9 feet deep.* 



AVarwickshire has more than an average of wet, or clay lands, 

 which offer but small encouragement to the cultivator until they 

 ■are drained ; and we may say of this, as of other counties, that 

 the work proceeds rapidly, but much remains to be done. Fields 

 laid out in 8-feet ridges have the drains placed in every third 

 furrow ; there has been a general disposition of late to drain 

 deeper, and the instances are common of pipes laid at 30 inches 

 being taken up and replaced a foot deeper. 



Deep ditches, cut at no small cost or labour, and narrow ridges, 

 have disappeared, superseded by the draining-pipe ; crooked 

 hedge-rows, and high banks, have been replaced by neat fences 

 of quickset. We saw some admirable hedges of quickset on a 

 gravel farm, where everybody declared they could not be pro- 

 duced ; a trench, 30 inches deep by 30 inches wide, was dug out, 

 and filled with mould, with the addition of a small quantity of 

 manure, and the plants were thus forced into rapid growth, 



Mr. Murray considered irrigation neglected in this county ; 

 and we are sorry to say it is almost equally so at the present 

 day. Authorities tell us that streams, which produce water- 

 cresses and good trout, may be looked upon as adapted for 

 irrigation, the water proving in general congenial to the growth 

 of the grasses. In Warwickshire, with its numberless streams 

 and rills, the water teems ^Yith these evidences of its available 

 character ; it is nevertheless seldom made use of. The practice 

 .seems even less appreciated than at a former age ; the Stour, 

 at its junbtion with the Avon, was evidently once employed 



* It is almost unnecessaiy to say that this mode of drainage (of which a 

 detailed description like that in the text may perhaps be not inappropriately 

 retained in a report of the county in which Elkington was born, and practised his 

 system) is properly superseded by the modern practice of deep parallel drains. 

 Except to meet the very rare case of insuperable difficulty of outfall, holes sunk 

 below the bottom of a 4-foot di-ain to hrimj vp water from greater depths ai'e 

 ■useless. The specific action of drains of proper depth and interval upon the 

 adjacent soil is obviously the same, let the source of the fluid be what it may. 

 Probably in no art to which they have ever been applied have the laws of hydro- 

 statics been more outraged than in that of land drainage. Their extreme sim- 

 plicity (compared with those which are concerned with elastic, imponderable, or 

 invisible bodies) has often been the very stumbling-block of half- informed minds, 

 which look for and exact a certain amount of the mysterious as an element in- 

 separable from, and necessary to the dignity of, science. To such persons — and 

 unfortunately 'professed' drainers of- local celebrity sometimes belong to the 

 class — simplicity ("the test of truth") is distasteful, and demonstration use- 

 less. Thus in some very drain-needing parts of North Warwickshire it is a 

 common belief that water "draws better" down a curved drain than a straight 

 one ; and, in one instance, it was not until after reiterated arguments, and, after 

 all, not upon sincere conviction, that a man superinteiuUng the drainage of a rather 

 level field, could be persuaded that a " sharper" outfall could be obtained down 

 one side of a square tlian by going round the three other sides, because there was 

 a slight depressiou of the surface in the latter direction. — C. W. H. 



