4 CHALK FARMING IN WILTSHIRE 



the origin of the name, the bake connotes a thin black 

 soil crowded with small angular flints, with pure chalk 

 below at a depth of four or five inches only. Near as 

 the chalk is, the thin soil has sometimes been washed 

 free of carbonate of lime, and responds to chalking 

 and the use of lime and manures like basic slag con- 

 taining lime ; in other places increasing the depth of 

 cultivation has remedied this shortage of lime. Many 

 of the agreements stipulate that the bake shall be 

 farmed on a five-field shift, in which two corn crops 

 oats and barley or always oats are taken in five 

 years, with green crops between ; but more often a 

 simple alternation of cereal and green crop, eaten off 

 by sheep, is followed, with an occasional rest for a few 

 years in sainfoin. Naturally enough these uplands 

 never see a manure cart ; superphosphate is used for 

 the roots, and the rest of the fertility is brought in the 

 cake and corn fed to the folded sheep. Below the 

 bake comes the " four-field " land, free-working loams 

 still very flinty and inclined to be heavy and sticky 

 when they are low enough to lie on the chalk marl. 

 This is the typical corn land farmed on the Wiltshire 

 rotation, in which two years of straw crops follow two 

 years of root crops eaten off by sheep. Barley follows 

 the wheat ; then half the field goes into clover and rye 

 grass, the other half into vetches, rye, or winter barley, 

 to be followed by rape and turnips. The system is 

 directed towards providing the sheep with some green 

 crop during every month of the year, and before the 

 turnips are over the rye or winter barley must be 

 ready to take the ewes and lambs. Generally the 

 fold passes over the land three times during the 

 rotation, and little farmyard manure finds its way even 

 to the four-field land. Of late years dairying has 

 extended into this district wherever the farmer 



