124 HIGH FARMING IN NORTHUMBRIA 



cattle displayed. Much of this must be set down to 

 the dairy farmers, especially the smaller men who are 

 so numerous near the towns ; they buy their milch 

 cows where they can find them, irrespective of breed ; 

 and any kind of bull is used, so that a constant stream 

 of calves bred anyhow are being put in circulation and, 

 with the present dearth of store cattle, get reared to 

 maturity. But in North Yorkshire the pure-bred 

 Shorthorn reigns supreme, the old type, which is a 

 good all-round farmer's beast and hard to beat either 

 as a producer of milk or of beef. We were indeed 

 nearing the ancestral home of the Shorthorns ; for it 

 was at Ketton and at Barmston, just across the river 

 in Durham, that the brothers Colling, working along 

 Bakewell's lines with the local cattle, evolved the 

 modern Shorthorns, or Durhams, as they are still 

 called over a great part of the world. After the 

 Ceilings' time, Bates and Booth gave their names to 

 the two leading strains of Shorthorns ; and Bates 

 belonged to Kirklevington in Cleveland, while the 

 Booths lived near Northallerton. Over all this 

 country, from Thirsk north to Darlington, and on to 

 Durham and beyond, the descendants of these great 

 stocks stood nearly knee-deep in the ample grass of 

 the dripping summer of 1910, and we hardly saw a 

 bad one among them. 



Durham and the southern part of Northumberland 

 are counties of violent contrasts, so rapidly does one 

 exchange purely pastoral or agricultural country for 

 densely populated colliery areas or that still more dreary 

 land where the coal has been won and farming is being 

 resumed in a half-hearted way. The surface of the 

 country is covered pretty deeply by glacial drifts ; but 

 as they resemble in nature the underlying rocks of 

 the coal measures, they give rise to comparatively poor 



