Improvements in Farming 65 



rain, or from the overflowing of streams, has the same result 

 when it cannot penetrate the stiff or hard layers of subsoil. About 

 1760 Joseph Elkington, a farmer in Warwickshire, devised a 

 scheme for getting at springs and leading off the waters before 

 they broke from their underground channels and spread them- 

 selves over the surface. This often meant deep cutting or boring 

 and frequent failure. 



Practical men in different counties had adopted the system of 

 drainage in use to-day. Arthur Young made his survey of farming 

 in Suffolk in 1803, and he tells of two men whom he discovered 

 pursuing the modern method, which he considered wrong. 

 4 There are two errors ', he says, ' very common in the performance 

 of this improvement. The first is making the drains in, or nearly 

 in, the direction of the declivity, whereas they ought always to 

 be made obliquely across it. The other is that of marking out 

 and making numerous drains across the sides of springy hills, 

 which might in many cases be drained completely with a single 

 drain judiciously disposed, according to those obvious principles 

 upon which Mr. Elkington proceeds. Mr. Simpson of Wilnesham 

 and Captain Wootton of Rattlesden contend that, in drawing 

 out hollow drains, it is right to mark them with the declivity and 

 not across it, as the drains then draw both ways, whereas when 

 across the slope they can draw only on one side.' Young returns 

 to the subject again. ' In hollow draining,' he says, ' Mr. Simpson 

 has a singular practice ... he draws them with the slope . . . the 

 idea is new, and the fact is that no fields can be better drained, 

 he asserts, than his own in this method. . . . His common drains 

 are 1 6 to 18 feet asunder, and 26 to 30 inches deep, and filled 

 with straw.' 



The credit for discovering this sensible system of drainage is 

 generally given to James Smith of Deanston, Perthshire, who 

 introduced it in 1823. He not only practised it and made a vast 

 improvement on the land which he farmed, he published a little 



2535-7 E 



