196 THE BEAUTIES OF NATURE CHAP. 
the water, or a pink speckled trout glides 
out of sight. 
In many of ‘our midland and northern 
counties most of the meadows lie in parallel 
undulations or “rigs.” These are generally 
about a furlong (220 yards) in length, and 
either one or two poles (53 or 11 yards) in 
breadth. They seldom run straight, but tend 
to curve towards the left. At each end of 
the field a high bank, locally called a balk, 
often 3 or 4 feet high, runs at right angles to 
the rigs. In small fields there are generally 
eight, but sometimes ten, of these rigs, which 
make in the one case 4, in the other 5 acres. 
These curious characters carry us back to the 
old tenures, and archaic cultivation of land, 
and to a period when the fields were not in 
pasture, but were arable. 
They also explain our curious system of 
land measurement. The “acre” is the amount 
which a team of oxen were supposed to plough 
in a day. It corresponds to the German 
“morgen” and the French “ journée.” The 
furlong or long “furrow” is the distance 
which a team of oxen can plough conven- 
