Exmoor Reclamation. 
87 
Exmoor, paying for some dozen farms an average rent of 300/. 
a year apiece. For several years previous no farm had become 
vacant on Exmoor without it being an object of keen compe- 
tition by men bred within twenty miles of the confines of the 
Forest. 
But it must be added that between 1853 and 1863 great im- 
provements of a cheap and simple character had been made in 
the treatment of the land of Exmoor. Mr. Knight had still to 
face the inconvenience of holding in hand many thousand 
acres. Attempts made, with great perseverance and more than 
ordinary knowledge of the principles and practice of breeding, 
to improve the size and quality of the breeding stud of ponies, 
by using stallions of a superior character, did not pay. As 
long as the ponies were treated as wild animals, finding their 
living on the open moor, helped with a little forest hay in 
the rare snow-storms, they cost next to nothing ; but as soon 
as they were improved in breed it was found necessary to feed 
them well in winter on hay and roots, if not with corn, grown 
on reclaimed land, if they were to grow into animals of any 
value. If crops were to be grown and gathered to feed ponies, 
it would evidently pay better to feed flocks whose ewes give a 
fleece and a lamb every year. 
• After many inquiries conducted in Scotland, and some ex- 
periments with a flock of four or five hundred ewes of the 
Exmoor breed, Mr. Knight determined on stocking the still 
unlet portions of the moor with Cheviot or black-faced ewe 
flocks, to be tended by Scotch shepherds on the Scotch system 
of selling off the lambs, made as fat as possible, every autumn. 
This plan has recently been made more easy of execution by 
the extension through the hill district of the railroads from 
Taunton, that give access to markets as distant as Bristol, 
Birmingham, and London. 
This very bold, not to say revolutionary, experiment was en- 
couraged by the successful operations of his agent, Mr. Frederick 
Lovibond Smyth, in growing rape as artificial food for sheep on 
waste land, not more than three or four miles from the Exmoor 
boundary, without the great expenses that attend root-growing 
and preparing land for that purpose. 
Mr. Frederick Smyth was a tenant of a farm (Westland 
Pound) under Earl Fortescue, when, in 1857, on the inclosure 
of Challacombe Common, several hundred acres of waste 
land, composed of peat from 12 to 30 inches deep, resting 
on the before-mentioned impervious j)an, were added to West- 
land Pound. 
Mr. Smyth tried the experiment of cultivating this wet peat- 
land by paring, burning, and once ploughing it, then sowing 
