io 4 ROUND THE YEAR 



furrows of ploughed land. These last are so ill-defined 

 that I should not have recognised them, if I had not 

 lately walked past those very fields. Falling into talk 

 with a farm-labourer, he pointed out which pastures 

 had been reaped within his own memory. Higher up 

 the valley are terraces, once cultivated by the spade, 

 and there are many signs that corn and vegetables 

 formerly flourished where now all is grass. Such 

 traces of ancient tillage are not peculiar to Wharfe- 

 dale or to Yorkshire. They are common in all parts of 

 England. Canon Raine points out that in parts of 

 Tynedale which have never been tilled within living 

 memory the Black Book of Hexham Priory shows that 

 corn was once raised. " If this evidence were wanting, 

 the lay-riggs, as they are called, which the rich sward 

 of untold years has been unable to obliterate, still 

 show decisively that in days long gone by the plough- 

 man and the sower have been there." l Marshall in 

 1804 found that over all the country from the Tamar 

 to the eastern border of Dorsetshire, open commons 

 which had never been ploughed within the memory 

 of man were marked with ridge and furrow. 2 



Corn -rigs on grass land do not necessarily prove a 

 diminution in the acreage of tilled land. In our day 

 the few ploughed fields of this part of Wharfedale 

 belong to the lower and richer lands. But when 

 drainage was rare and insufficient, these low-lying 

 fields were considered too wet and too liable to inun- 



1 History of Hexham Priory, Vol. II. Preface, p. xviii. 

 (Surtees Soc.). 



^ 2 Quoted by Prothero, Pioneers and Progress of English 

 Farming. 



