156 THE VALE OF PEWSEY 



evaporation, steeper surfaces add to the cost of the 

 ploughland, but, on the other hand, give rise to more 

 certain and luxuriant grass, tempting the grazier to 

 forgo the risks of cultivation. When the great 

 depression came a generation ago it was the arable 

 farming in the east that was most hardly hit ; corn 

 prices fell while wages tended to rise, whereas beef and 

 milk continued to be profitable. As the Royal Com- 

 mission afterwards reported, the gross returns on the 

 arable farms fell to something like one-half of their 

 former values, and most of the older farmers retired 

 or ruined themselves before they learned to adapt their 

 methods to the new conditions. In the west, however, 

 it was an easy process to lay down a few more fields 

 to grass and to continue without any change of system 

 or great reduction of rent. In consequence there has 

 been less of a revolution among western methods and 

 western men ; grazing is an easy and conservative 

 business compared to the management of ploughland, 

 and the grass farmers have lived along without the 

 violent stimulus for good and evil which overtook the 

 arable men, until as a consequence there is nowadays 

 a larger proportion of slipshod backward farms to be 

 seen west of the Severn than on the other side of the 

 country. 



But the west is, after all, not wholly grass ; just as 

 in the east the chalk with its many ramifications is the 

 source of a great area of thin soils under the plough, 

 so in the western Midlands the New Red Sandstone 

 equally gives rise to light land, and all the way from 

 Worcestershire, through Shropshire, Cheshire, and 

 Lancashire, up to Cumberland, accounts for a very 

 considerable expanse of arable farming. It is true 

 that the New Red Sandstone is largely obscured by 

 drift formations of considerable thickness ; but this 



