THOROUGH DRAINING. 203 



see more of Welsh scenery, and going to the vale of Llan- 

 gollen (pronounced Langothlan), while I had a letter I wished 

 to deliver in another direction. 



The park was covered with lines of recently-made under- 

 drains, and I hunted over it in hopes to find men at work, that 

 I might see the manner in which they were constructed. 

 Going to a pretty checkered timber-house to make inquiries, I 

 was so fortunate as to meet the foreman of the draining op 

 erations, Mr. Green, an intelligent Warwickshire man, who 

 obligingly took me to a field a mile or two distant, where he 

 had thirty men at work. The soil was a gravelly loam, with 

 a little heavier subsoil. The drums were laid twenty-seven 

 feet apart, and dug three feet deep (ordinarily), and one foot 

 wide from top to bottom ; in the middle of the bottom a 

 groove was cut for the pipe, so the top of it would be three 

 feet from the surface. No narrow tools were used, except to 

 cut the grooves for the pipe. The foreman said that though 

 a man could work to much better advantage in a wider- 

 mouthed drain, the extra dirt to be moved compensated for 

 it, and made this plan the cheapest. 



I thought then, and since, until I came to try it in gravelly 

 and stony land, that the work might be done much more 

 rapidly with the long, narrow tools described by Mr. Dela- 

 field,* making the bottom of the drain only of the width of 

 the pipe intended to be laid ; but I find these can only be 

 used to advantage in free ground. The method here described 

 is probably the best for draining soils, where many stones 

 larger than a hen s egg are to be met with. 



Cylindrical pipes, of either one or one and a half inch 

 bore, were laid in the grooves at the bottom of the drain ; 

 mllars, connecting them, were only used in the loosest soils. 



* Transactions N. T. State Agricultural S&c., 1848, p. 232. ; 



