WARPING 109 



is not the whole of the work here necessary in order 

 to make the new land. The further process is called 

 warping, and consists in building up a deposit of tidal 

 silt several feet thick on the wet and valueless marsh. 

 A little farther north, in the parish of Crowle, we saw 

 the process at work on an area of very low land about 

 six miles back from the estuary of the Ouse, which in 

 this neighbourhood joins the Trent and forms the 

 Humber. The unimproved land forms a wide area of 

 " moor," wet peaty bog covered with a vegetation of 

 tufted grass, bracken, heather, and stunted birches and 

 pines, practically without value for agriculture. A 

 company is engaged in digging the peat for conversion 

 into moss litter ; only the top three or four feet which 

 is still fibrous can be so used, but that surface layer 

 is cut out, stacked and dried, and then conveyed to 

 the factory. There it passes through a disintegrator 

 and the coarser part of the result is pressed up into 

 the well-known bales of peat moss litter for transit. 

 The dust and smaller fragments are reduced to a still 

 finer powder and used as an absorbent for molasses in 

 order to make a cattle food ; the peat moss made in 

 this district is exported as far as Natal, where the sugar 

 works can find no nearer nor better vehicle for the 

 molasses they produce. 



These Yorkshire litter works had been founded on 

 Dutch models, and were for a time largely worked by 

 Dutch labour, but the labourers first brought over, like 

 the drainage adventurers two centuries ago, have been 

 merged in the country population and the workers are 

 now English enough. After the peat has been cut out 

 a bank is built round the area to enclose about two 

 hundred acres, and a connection is made with the 

 warping drain, a straight channel which leads to the 

 estuary, with powerful sluice gates at the entrance. 



