28 Laying Down Poor Land. 



exhausted land, with the addition of various deep- 

 rooting plants to the mixture of grasses and clovers 

 suitable for such soils. 



The fields operated on — the Outer Kaimrig, 22 acres, 

 and the Inner Kaimrig, 25 acres — were two of those 

 fields of which there are only too many examples in 

 Scotland, and which never should have been enclosed 

 from the hill and ploughed unless with the intention 

 of at once laying them down to permanent pasture, 

 or treating them on the same system as that previously 

 recommended by me. But they had been managed, 

 and probably for the last fifty years, on the same five- 

 course system as the best lands of the farm, but 

 without the advantages of the latter, for the land was 

 so high and distant from the steading that no farm-yard 

 manure was ever applied to it, and the only manure 

 it ever got was just enough of artificials to grow 

 the turnip crop. Everything, then, came down, and 

 nothing went up except the ploughs, liorses, and people 

 which were requisite every rotation to more and more 

 thoroughly exhaust the soil, and, worse still, more and 

 more impair its physical condition. What to do with 

 such fields was indeed a problem, and one of them 

 in particular reminds me of Ai'thur Young's description 

 of some land he unfortunately embarked in, and of 

 which he graphically wrote — " I know not what epithet 

 to give this soil — sterility falls short of the idea — a 

 hungry, vitriolic gravel. I occupied for nine years 

 the jaws of a wolf It was calculated to swallow, 

 without return, all that folly or imprudence could 

 bestow on it." And the soil of my fields must have 

 been nearly as bad, for one of them consisted to a 

 considerable extent of a poor thin moory soil, while 

 the other only contained a certain proportion of fair 

 hill soil, and to have attempted to treat them on the 

 old system would certainly have been to occupy the 

 jaws of a wolf or a crocodile. I then determined on 

 laying them down to permanent pasture, and they 



