208 



MY LIFE 



[Chap. 



Of green crops (except potatoes can be so called) he has not the slightest 

 idea, and if he takes no more than three grain crops off the land in suc- 

 cession, he thinks he does very well ; five being not uncommon. The first 

 and principal crop is wheat, on which he bestows all the manure he can 

 muster, with a good quantity of lime. He thus gets a pretty good crop. 

 The next year he gets a crop of barley without any manure whatever, and 

 after that a crop of oats, unmanured. He then leaves the field fallow 

 till the others have been treated in the same manner, and then returns to 

 serve it thus cruelly again ; first, however, getting his potato crop before his 

 wheat. Some, after the third crop (oats), manure the land as well as 

 they can, and sow barley with clover, which they mow and feed off the 

 second year, and then let it remain as pasture for some time ; others, 

 again, have three crops of oats in succession after the wheat and barley, 

 and thus render the land utterly useless for many years. 



In this manner the best crops of wheat they can get with abundance 

 of manure, on land above the average quality, is about twenty bushels per 

 acre — ten bushels is, however, more general, and sometimes only seven or 

 eight are obtained. 



The rough pastures on which the cattle get their living and waste their 

 manure a great part of the time consist chiefly of various species of 

 rushes and sedges, a few coarse grasses, and gorse and fern on the drier 

 parts. They are frequently, too, covered with brambles, dwarf willows, 

 and alders. 



The " short-hay meadows," as they are called, are a class of lands 

 entirely unknown in most parts of England ; I shall, therefore, endeavour 

 to describe them. 



They consist of large undulating tracts of lands on the lower slopes of 

 the mountains, covered during autumn, winter, and spring with a very 

 short brownish yellow wet turf. In May, June, and July the various 

 plants forming this turf spring up, and at the end of summer are mown, 

 and form short-hay " ; and well it deserves the name, for it is frequently 

 almost impossible to take it up with a hayfork, in which case it is raked 

 up and gathered by armfuls into the cars. The produce varies from two 

 to six hundredweight per acre ; four may be about the average, or five 

 acres of land to produce a ton of hay. During the rest of the year it is 

 almost good for nothing. It is astonishing how such stuff can be worth 

 the labour of mowing and making into hay. An English farmer would 

 certainly not do it, but the poor Welshman has no choice ; he must either 

 cut his short-hay or have no food for his cattle in the winter ; so he sets 

 to, and sweeps away with his scythe a breadth which would astonish an 

 English mower. 



The soil which produces these meadows is a poor yellow clay resting 

 on the rock ; on the surface of the clay is a stratum of peaty vegetable 

 matter, sometimes of considerable thickness though more generally only 

 a few inches, which collects and retains the moisture in a most remark- 

 able manner, so that though the ground should have a very steep slope 

 the water seems to saturate and cling to it like a sponge, so much so that 



