274 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



that it scarcely departs from a horizontal plane, streket. 

 The white earth, jorden, which occurs in the valleys 

 on the south side of the beck, has doubtless been washed 

 down from the neighbouring chalk hills, because the soil, 

 jordmon, is identical; but that it has not gone on to 

 the other side of the beck, may probably have been 

 caused in this way, that the water in the beck, which 

 runs tolerably swiftly, always carries the same away with 

 it* 



I also imagine that in the first instance the earth on 

 the south side of the brook has been down in the valleys 

 of the same black, svarta, colour as it is immediately 

 on the other and north side ; but has afterwards been 

 covered, ofver hdlgd, by the white earth which has 

 been washed down from the chalk hill : for the black soil 

 on the north side of the beck seems to have to thank the 

 beck for it, that it has got to retain its colour. Here on 

 the north side of the beck, the land was again divided 

 into small inclosures or tappor, of arable fields, meadows 

 or pastures, surrounded with living hedges, though here 

 also we were met by large arable or Common Fieldsf 

 which there lay in teg-skifte, exchangeable slips, or 

 'lands,' and were ridged like the ploughed fields in 

 Nerike. When we came two miles north of Ivinghoe, the 

 fields acquired a still blacker colour, so that the soil there 

 was almost like a svart-mylla, 'black-earth.' They 

 were all laid out in 20-feet broad ridges, tolerably high, 

 exactly like the arable in Westmanland, only that a great 

 part of these ridge- [T. I. p. 272] lands were so, that along 



* The true reason is that the base of the chalk is reached near the brook, 

 which here flows from S.W. to N.E., and that the Gault passes under the 

 chalk, dipping S.E. [J. L.] 



f Alas, by a mistaken political economy, these and other open fields 

 have been enclosed. [J. L.] 



