Laying down Poor Land. 29 



I never thought that I should be able to prove it to such 

 an extent as I am now able to do ; and, as the subject is 

 of great importance, I propose to enter, with some 

 degree of detail, into the particulars of the first experi- 

 ments made by me as regards laying down poor and 

 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, horses, and people, which 

 were requisite every rotation to more and more tho- 

 roughly 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 Arthur Young's description of some land 

 he unfortunately embarked in, and of which he graphi- 

 cally 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, witljout 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 



