302 On the Agricultural Improvements of Lincolnshire. 
cannot be grown on it, or, if grown, cannot be removed without 
trampling it into a state of clay. There is no doubt, at all events, 
that the practice answers upon the wolds, where a farmer would 
as little think of holding his farm without sheep on his turnips, 
as without beasts in his yard. It is equally general upon the 
opposite range of Lincoln Heath, where, if the reader will now 
cross the great central plain of the county, we may close our 
survey of Lincolnshire farming. 
This range, which T have already endeavoured to describe as it 
was shown me by Mr. Handley, had lost none of its agricultural 
beauty in last October ; but I need not, as on the Wolds, establish 
by evidence its former barrenness, since of that the Dunston Pillar 
is still a visible witness. One passage of Mr. Young's Report in 
1799 will be therefore enough : — 
" The vast benefit of enclosing can, upon inferior soils, be rarely seen 
in a more advantageous light than upon Lincoln Heath. I found a large 
range which formerly was covered with heath, gorse, &c., and yielding 
in fact little or no produce, converted by enclosure to profitable arable 
farms, let on an average at 10^. an acre, and a very extensive country, 
all studded vri/h new farm-houses, hams, qfice", and every appearance 
of thriving industry ; nor is the extent small, for these heaths extend 
near seventy miles, and the progress is so great in twenty years that 
very little remains to do. The effect of these enclosures has heen very 
great ; for while rents have risen on the heath from nothing in most 
instances, and next to nothing in the rest, to 8^. or 10^. an acre, the 
farmers are in much better circumstances, a great produce is created, 
cattle and sheep increased, and the poor employed." 
This is indeed a bright picture of wide and rapid improvement 
drawn at the close of the last century ; and Mr. Young might 
well sav that little remained to do. But has nothing been done? 
Under another head of his report, " Amount of Crops," I find 
the following entry : — " In the enclosures from the heath — crop 
of barley, three quarters ; oats, four; no wheat." And in my 
own note-book, taken on the same heath in the present year : — 
" barley, six quarters; oats, none — since they are too poor a grain 
for such farms ; wheat, four quarters, sometimes five,"^ — a warning 
that in farming, as in other pursuits, we should not say "very 
little remains to do." This latter amount of crops, too, was noted 
upon a farm which is thus spoken of hy Mr. Young even in 1799, 
when the general enclosure of Lincoln Heath had been carried 
out; it is under the head 'Wastes.' "At Blankney and its 
vicinity Mr. Chaplin has 3000 or 4000 acres of warrens let at the 
highest at 3s. 6c/. an acre, some at '2s." This very land was enclosed 
by the present Mr. Chaplin as lately as the year 1823, a year of 
the lowest depression for agricultural prices and spirits, so that 
his undertaking was spoken of as an act of absurdity ; but Mr. 
