142 APPENDIX 



available, and because few landowners have had 

 sufficient confidence in the situation or faith in science 

 to embark capital on agricultural enterprises during 

 the last thirty years. It is for this reason that such 

 accounts as are available of the costs of land reclama- 

 tion in England afford no guidance to the possibilities 

 that are open. They sometimes show good results 

 where the land was initially healthy, as on Lincoln 

 Heath, or where plentiful supplies of town refuse were 

 available, as in Cheshire, Bedford, or parts of Surrey ; 

 elsewhere they have been unremunerative and have 

 led to the widespread tradition that the most ruinous 

 of all proceedings is to try to turn bad land into good. 

 Before discussing the different types of waste land 

 that are capable of reclamation in Great Britain, it 

 is perhaps advisable to render the term more precise 

 by excluding those forms of improvement that may 

 be regarded as within the scope of a tenant holding a 

 lease of reasonable duration. Many examples of 

 rough waste land occur that can profitably be brought 

 into cultivation by ordinary means, e.g. fields of clay 

 land overgrown with briers and brambles, which only 

 require cleaning and draining, with a dressing of basic 

 slag, to convert them into decent grass land. The 

 term " reclamation " is better reserved for such cases 

 as involve a preliminary expenditure of capital on a 

 scale comparable with or greater than the initial value 

 of the land, and begin with certain defined operations 

 which are apart from the ordinary routine of cultiva- 

 tion. Reclamation deals with land the initial value of 

 which lies between £1 and perhaps £7 per acre as an 

 upper limit, and the outlay before the land can be 



