WASTEFUL HEDGEROWS 357 



and slow to dry during harvest. A big hedge to a 

 small field is quite enough to cause the repeated loss 

 of the rare opportunities of getting home a crop that 

 do occur even during such a rainy time as the August 

 of 1912, when only the farmers who seized upon bare 

 possibilities of harvest saved their crops before the 

 deluges that marked the latter part of the month. 

 Hedges, again, are always harbours of weeds and of 

 those growing plagues, rats and sparrows, and the only 

 good that can be said of them is that they provide 

 shelter for stock. As to the waste of land by our big 

 wandering hedges, Prout calculated that by straighten- 

 ing up his Sawbridgeworth farm he gained 16 acres 

 in 450. Again, the prevalence of small and irregularly 

 shaped fields forms one of the great obstacles to really 

 economic farming in England. It is not merely that 

 time is wasted over the constant turnings, but a man 

 gets thereby into a retail way of looking at things, 

 and puts out of his consideration all schemes for 

 handling crops on a large scale with the help of 

 machinery. In most parts of England the necessary 

 preliminary to any capitalist exploitation of the land, 

 such as would be extremely profitable on the thousand 

 or two thousand acre scale, would necessarily begin 

 with a complete reconstruction of the existing divisions 

 of the land. When the old landlords drained and 

 marled to improve their estates, it is a pity they did 

 not also remap them ; many of our fields have remained 

 unchanged in shape or name from as far back as their 

 history is recorded, for the changes wrought by Enclosure 

 Acts only affected a portion of the country. 



The farm we went to visit was fairly typical of the 

 conditions that prevail near Tavistock, where the soft 

 Devonian shales weather down to a deep red soil, 

 rather heavy to work in the moist climate but intrinsic- 



