Exmoor Reclamation. 
77 
the Exmoor * of the present day communicating- with the 
sea-coast at Barnstaple, Ilfracombe, Lynton, Minehead ; and 
with South Molton, Dulverton, and Taunton, by good coach- 
roads and well-provided bridges over the winter torrents. But 
in 1818 the only means of communication was by the tracks 
travelled over by the once celebrated, now extinct, Devonshire 
pack-horse — that famous animal which disappeared before road 
waggons and carriers' carts, just as these have been superseded 
by railway-trains. 
Mr. Knight began by building, of the dry stone of the country, 
a fence more than forty miles in length round the Exmoor 
portion of his property. He next constructed excellent roads, 
north, south, east, and west ; roads which remain examples to 
the county for the skill with which they were laid out, and the 
solidity with which they were executed. These, for the first 
time, gave Exmoor access to the neighbouring market-towns 
and ports, and, last, though not least, to limekilns. 
He laid the foundations of a mansion, wich was never com- 
pleted, and is at present a picturesque ruin ; he inclosed a num- 
ber of fields of from 50 to 100 acres each, and established farms 
east and west of Simon's Bath. On these farms he set zealously 
to work to carry out the system of cultivation that had been so 
successful in his native county under a very different climate. 
He had farmed largely all his life in the north of Worcestershire, 
and had had a share in bringing into cultivation large tracts of 
heathy common on the New Red Sandstone in that county, much 
resembling in character the Cannock Chase of our own times. 
The appearance of Exmoor in genial seasons was so superior 
in apparent fertility to that of the Norfolk blowing-sand and 
the Lincoln heaths and wolds, that he never doubted that the 
famous four-course system would convert it, with the help of 
turnips and sheep, into profitable barley-, if not wheat-land. 
His efforts were vain, — defeated by a climate that made corn- 
growing at any price unprofitable : for, even if the mechanical 
means, which have so recently been perfected, had been in 
existence for breaking up and mixing the soil at Exmoor, it 
was impossible, at the elevation of 1000 to 1500 feet above the 
sea-level, except in very exceptional years, to ripen the crops 
of wheat and barley. 
Had Mr. Knight met with a little work written by a Lam- 
mermuir farmer, and printed in 1823, by the father of the pre- 
sent Sir Hugh Hume Campbell, he would perhaps have learned 
that the capital he sank, and the tenacious energy with which 
* " The Ordnance map of Exmoor ia so curiously incorrect that it must have 
been composed out of the inner consciousness of the siu'veyor — valleys are made 
hills, and hills valleys." — Letter to the Author, 
