LITTLE GADDESDEN. 285 



it was a very rare thing to get to see a spring. The 

 parishes or the villages lay partly on the chalk hills, 

 partly in the dales in the same, yet commonly without 

 having access to any spring. This was so at Little 

 Gaddesden, and at other villages. All the water they 

 had was taken out of wells or ponds, brunnar eller 

 dammar. Thus there were at nearly every village, one 

 or more large ponds expressly dug to be collecting places 

 for the water. Here the people took their water, and 

 here the cattle slaked their thirst. In some places in the 

 pastures there were also similar ponds for the sake of the 

 cattle. The country is here little else than a collection 

 of chalk hills, as it were, set beside each other, long-slop- 

 ing nearly on all sides. Between these chalk-hills are 

 deep dales. When the land in other parts of the world 

 goes in such undulations up and down, or consists of a 

 chain of hills and dales, there nearly always runs a small 

 if not a larger beck down in the dales between the hills. 

 So have I seen it in Russia, so it is in Sweden, so have 

 I since found it in America, but not so here. The 

 bottoms of the dales consist either of arable fields, 

 meadows, pastures [T. I. p. 282] or commons, utmarker, 

 without any running water being seen. It is very seldom 

 that any beGk is met with here. The conclusion, there- 

 fore, seems to be that a land which consists of chalk- 

 hills has indeed its springs, becks, and rivers ; but still 

 not nearly in the same abundance as a land which con- 

 sists of granite and clay soil, grabarg och lergrund. 

 After we had to-day walked over very large arable fields, 

 which lay smooth and even, and closely resembled the 

 fields in Upland in Sweden, only that on these English 

 ones no acre-reins are found, but the plots lay all in flat 

 broad land, we met with a spring,* rakade vi pa en 



* This was Buckshead or Boxstead Spring. [J. L.] 



