88 THE FERTILITY OF THE SOIL [CH. 



land that has never been coveted by agriculturists, 

 and so has always remained untouched. Even 

 where the land has been taken up the process was 

 very incomplete: village greens and commons have 

 been left, the roads are wide, much wider, in fact, 

 than need be now-a-days, so that only a part is made 

 up and the rest is left as untidy picturesque wastes 

 of bramble and briar, inhabited occasionally by a 

 few roving gipsies or tramps, but of no practical 

 value to anyone else. The fields are often small 

 and the straggling hedges and ditches occupy a dis- 

 proportionally large area of the land. The hedges 

 are badly kept and the bushes have been allowed to 

 develope into trees, so that looking over a clay region 

 such as the Weald of Kent one gets the impression 

 of a heavily wooded country. The farming is reduced 

 to its simplest, grass only is grown because that 

 involves least trouble and expense, and the land 

 is worked with the lowest possible expenditure of 

 money and labour. 



Such heavy unremunerative soils can be found in 

 places on the clays of the Coal Measures, the Oxford 

 Clay, the Weald and elsewhere. They merge in- 

 sensibly into lighter and more tractable soils, which 

 in turn shade off into the fertile loams. But no 

 limits can be set anywhere. At one end of the series 

 we have valuable fertile loams, at the other end clay 

 wastes; and somewhere in between come a number 



