8 A FARMER'S YEAR 



and you must be careful lest you twist your ankle. But heavy 

 land, unless it be very 'thin in the skin,' does not necessarily 

 mean bad land. Indeed, if I were given the choice, I would more 

 lightly undertake a heavy-land farm in good order than one 

 liable to * scald,' which refuses to produce a crop of hay or roots 

 unless deluged day by day with rain. Perhaps, however, this 

 conviction owes something to the three years of drought which we 

 have just experienced. The clay of Bedingham laughs at drought; 

 as an old fellow there said to me, ' It didn't never take no harm 

 from it since Adam,' and on it during these dry years I have grown 

 some good barleys. For example, my Bedingham barley of 1896 

 fetched the highest price of any produced in this district that year. 



Several causes have combined to give the stiff soils so bad a 

 name, and to knock down the value of such land in East Anglia to 

 about io/. the acre. First and foremost among these is the ruinous 

 cheapness of corn. The heavy lands are corn-growing lands, and 

 if it no longer pays to grow the corn they are supposed to be of no 

 further value. I say ' supposed to be,' for reasons which I will 

 give presently. Then they are expensive to stock and work 

 properly ; the farmer must have good horses and enough of them, 

 the draining must be attended to in its proper rotation, and so 

 forth. Lastly, when once they are thoroughly foul and neglected 

 it is a long and costly business to bring them straight again. When 

 a ditch has not been cleaned, or a pond 'fyed,' or a field drained, 

 or a hedge cut on such a farm for years, as is often the case, it is 

 no child's task to overtake the work ; indeed, it cannot be done, 

 without great expense for labour, under a period of time, probably 

 two four-year shifts. This state of affairs means, moreover, that 

 the land is foul with docks and other weeds, and to clean it is a 

 labour of Hercules. Consequently, a heavy-land farm in this con- 

 dition, or anything approaching to it, is practically valueless to a 

 yearly tenant, as it would take him several years to ' right-side ' it, 

 during which time, unless he chanced to be a man of substance, 

 probably he would starve. 



Here is an instance of the extraordinary drop in the value of 



