338 NORTH WALES 



produce; and as this small area already provided 

 occupation for seven men, it was an excellent example 

 of the kind of rural industry that should be developed 

 in this country. In the United Kingdom, farming 

 should be a business that produces large returns per 

 acre by the employment of foresight in the manage- 

 ment and skill in the labour, instead of one that 

 depends on skimming the small profit which a large 

 area of land will return unaided. 



We have been coupling Anglesey with the Lleyn 

 peninsula, and the character of its surface and its 

 farming is very similar, though there is, as the traveller 

 to Holyhead knows, perhaps a greater proportion of 

 uncultivated land in Anglesey. The island is con- 

 stituted of a series of parallel folds of the older rocks 

 from the Coal Measures downwards, giving rise to a 

 variety of soils and a number of badly drained valleys 

 that are often swampy at their bottoms. The farms 

 are small, but rents run high and labour is cheap 

 indeed, in the remoter parts of the island the rate falls 

 to the Irish level of IDS. a week. And much of the 

 land is excellent ; we saw splendid fields of oats and 

 roots where no very great care had been lavished on 

 the farming. The fields are generally divided by 

 wasteful grass banks with gorse atop, and the grass- 

 land which largely predominates is occupied by the 

 usual black Welsh cattle and mountain sheep, which 

 are generally crossed with a foreign ram to produce 

 larger and earlier lambs. A curious survival for this 

 purpose is the old Wiltshire horned sheep, now extinct 

 in its original county, but still bred in North Wales 

 for crossing purposes. And a remarkable creature 

 does an old Wiltshire ram look ; high on the legs and 

 with a long fleece that is pulled off instead of being 

 shorn, it is therefore a thing of patches in the 



