ESTUARY LAND 143 



let for ordinary farming may be as high as £7 an acre, 

 irrespective of buildings and roads. 



In Great Britain opportunities for reclamation on 

 a reasonably large scale are to be found as follows : 



(1) Salt Marsh and Slob Lands under Water at High 

 Tide. — While no great area of this debatable ground 

 exists, payable areas ripe for reclamation are to be 

 found in many of the estuaries of our rivers, particu- 

 larly on the East Coast. Round the Wash the pro- 

 cess has always been going on and could now be 

 resumed with advantage ; other areas have been 

 examined in the Dee Estuary, the Firth of Forth, 

 Cromarty, etc. The process is well understood ; it 

 consists in throwing up a wall round the area, em- 

 banking any streams and providing them with outlets, 

 cutting drainage channels and providing them with 

 sluices to discharge at low water or with a pumping 

 station. In the Eastern Counties experience has 

 shown that it is rarely wise to embank land that has 

 not already been so far built up by natural actions as 

 to have acquired a green covering of vegetation. The 

 embankment is comparatively costly in labour and 

 varies with the size and shape of the area, but the 

 land gained is nearly always of high quaUty, worth 

 from £30 to £50 an acre. Perhaps the chief obstacle 

 to the prosecution of such work is the uncertain nature 

 of the title to areas of this kind. In the main the 

 property resides in the frontager ; the Crown possesses 

 certain ill-defined rights, but rarely can make use of 

 them except to deal with the frontager, the more so 

 as the strip to be reclaimed is often only accessible by 

 leave of the frontager. 



