48 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF BLACKPOOL AND DISTRICT 



Fylde. Dairying is for the liquid milk market and very little cheese-making 

 now remains in the Fylde proper. Many farms, particularly those of small 

 and medium size, have now no arable land at all, and few have more than 

 one-third of their acreage under the plough. Where arable remains, the 

 chief objective of cultivation is the provision of stock food, potatoes and wheat 

 being usually the only crops sold off the farm. The number of young cattle 

 grew side by side with the growth of the dairy herd until the end of the 

 nineteenth century, but since that time they have steadily declined both 

 relatively and actually. They are now too few to replenish cows drafted out 

 of the dairy herd and many dairy farmers now buy in their stock newly-calved 

 or about to calve from outside the district — from Ireland, from the Pennine 

 dales, from the margins of the Lake District, or from South-West Scotland. 

 On many farms the cattle are all cows or heifers in milk or in calf, with the 

 addition of a bull. Milk is exported to the seaside towns or to industrial 

 Lancashire and Liverpool. The Fylde helps to feed South Lancashire as it 

 did in the eighteenth century, but the export is now of milk and eggs rather 

 than of corn. The number of cattle being fed for the butcher has varied, but 

 shows no pronounced trend. They are usually kept by a few specialist graziers 

 or butchers, and many of them are imported Irish stores bought in at the 

 beginning of the grazing season and mostly finished by its close. 



The number of sheep has fluctuated widely. They have increased in recent 

 years owing to relatively favourable prices for mutton and lamb. There has 

 been a progressive change in the proportion of lambs and of adult sheep. In 

 1 870 there were more adult sheep than lambs, but to-day the keeping of sheep 

 in the Fylde is almost confined to the fattening of lambs for the seaside market, 

 ewes being brought in from the hill districts of Northern England in the early 

 autumn and sold fat with their lambs early in the following summer. The 

 pastures are then left free for the dairy herd. The number of pigs has increased 

 steadily throughout the period and is now over five times as great as in 1870. 

 The increase has been general, but most pronounced in the neighbourhood of 

 urban areas, where quantities of food refuse are available. Production is mainly 

 for the pork market. The number of fowls kept has also greatly increased. 

 Even in the eighteenth century the Fylde was an important poultry district. 

 The most rapid increase was after the Great War, when specialist poultry 

 farms with wired runs developed near the main roads. The general farmer has 

 also increased his poultry business, and his fowls are now usually kept in 

 flock houses in the middle of the pastures, instead of, as formerly, around the 

 bam door. 



These changes in farming practice have had their influence on the quantity 

 of rural population. The position is complicated in some parishes by the 

 growth of the seaside towns and by the development of residential settlement 

 along the main roads, but in those not so affected the course of change is clear. 

 Population increased from 1801 to 1821, but subsequently declined. By 

 1861 it had fallen to the level of 1801 and continued to fall until 1891 , when it 

 was about 90 per cent, of what it had been at the beginning of the century. 

 Thereafter it has remained steady. In the moss parishes north of the Wyre 

 the population continued to grow with reclamation and did not begin to decline 

 until nearly the end of the century. The increase in the early years of the 



