48 SPECIALIST FARMING: HOPS AND FRUIT 



into little farms, among which numbers of really 

 small holders have more recently found a footing. 

 To an increasing extent it is a residential district ; 

 and many of the bungalows and raw red-brick 

 cottages and villas, which look as if they might have 

 been transported bodily from a London suburb, have 

 been erected and are more or less maintained out of 

 savings earned somewhere else. But some of the 

 holdings have become self-supporting, though they 

 have grown up there, as on the outskirts of the New 

 Forest, on wretched land from an agricultural point 

 of view. 



A good deal of the country is still covered by wood- 

 land, though the small size of the fields and the 

 abundant hedgerow timber often, indeed, narrow 

 shaws that show the enclosure was originally cut out 

 of the forest make the country look more heavily 

 wooded than it is. Otherwise grassland predominates, 

 often of the poorest quality, because it is mown for 

 hay every year and then let to carry sheep from 

 the marshes through the winter, thus being both 

 hayed and grazed with little or no return of fertility. 

 The arable fields show a whitish, hungry-looking soil, 

 varying in consistency from a clay to something near 

 a sand, but never kindly to work and always deficient 

 in that essential to fertility lime. 



The good pastures are the brooks bordering the 

 streams in the steep-sided valleys, especially where 

 these brooks widen out into the marshes near the 

 sea. We crossed Pevensey Level, a broad expanse of 

 grass land which forms the seaward prolongation of the 

 southern arm of the Weald clay plain, just as Romney 

 Marsh extends from the corresponding northern arm. 

 It is covered with roughish, coarse-looking herbage, 

 which however possesses great feeding value. It is 



