142 



Farming of South Wales. 



but are fed from a bucket near the cottage door seven or eight 

 times in a day. They roam all about the roads and lanes,, and 

 retire to their hovel at night. In the summer it is customary to 

 boil the refuse of the garden and even wild herbs with the bran 

 that is sifted from the barley and oatmeal. In this way a pig is 

 brought to a large size, with great solicitude and little expense. 

 Barley-meal is generally used for fattening, and a pig will con- 

 sume 10 or 15 bushels. When killed, the meat is salted and 

 hung up in the roof to dry. The short-eared pigs are common 

 in the flat districts, where they are generally killed at an early 

 age as porkers. 



The cart-horses are small, but naturally hardy and active. 

 They are reared, like the cattle, entirely abroad, worked at a 

 very early age, and frequently badly fed. It cannot therefore be 

 wondered that many are sluggish and of a very mean description, 

 not capable of real work for two days together. The tender 

 shoot of the young furze, bruised or cut into chaff, forms with 

 some the principal winter provender ; with others a small supply 

 of poor hay, plenty of barley straw, pea haulm, and corn chaff. 

 There still exists the practice of baiting cart-horses in a close 

 stable till eight o'clock on a cold night, and then turning them 

 out to grass ! They feed on the pastures as long as there is 

 anything to be had, and the allowance of oats in the spring (if 

 any) is scanty in the extreme. The old Welsh punch is much 

 degenerated by injudicious crosses with high-bred animals, which 

 makes them too light and delicate. Another evil is common, 

 viz. that of breeding from very old, diseased, and worn- up mares. 



The management of the farm-yard manure is truly distressing, 

 and, as if rotten straw and a little dung was not poor enough, all 

 means of retaining the few fertilizers it possesses are totally disre- 

 garded. Cows being the stock kept, the manure is mainly made 

 by them. When brought up to be milked they are driven to a 

 large enclosure, called "a court," or to a " milking back," where 

 they amuse themselves with picking over various lumps of straw, 

 laid promiscuously about, and treading the remains of the last 

 meal into manure. The cleanings of the hovels in which the 

 calves or tender yearlings are kept, .are thrown in heaps by the 

 door into the same court, where all alike are dried by the sun and 

 washed by the rain. Some streams run through the farm-yard, 

 which carry away much of its richness into the next brook. 



The use of sea-sand and sea-weed, or "ore," as manure has been 

 long known, for in the reign of Queen Elizabeth Mr. George Owen 

 thus wrote : — " This kind of ore they often gather and lay on 

 great heapes, where it heteth and rotteth, and will have a strong 

 and loathsome smell ; when being so rotten they cast on the land, 

 as they do their muck, and thereof springeth good corn, especially 



