88 
Exmoor Reclamation. 
rape-seed with lime, at the rate of about 3 tons to an acre. The 
experiment was a success. Rape thus sown in June will 
produce a crop in six weeks, and it is the only crop that will 
grow before the land is laid dry, while the tap-roots pierce 
through the pan and help to disintegrate it. This crop of rape 
he ate down with sheep. He repeated the same rape crop for 
three or four successive years, each year having it eaten down 
by sheep, whose treading, aided by the penetration of the tap- 
roots of the rape, by that time decomposed the peat almost or 
quite down to the pan, which was broken up by the subsoil 
plough. The last year the reclaimed land was sown with rape 
and seeds mixed, and thus laid down to permanent pasture. 
Without lime, peat-land will grow nothing. The system of 
sowing rape with grass-seeds had been practised with success in 
the district for several years ; but the system of reclaiming moor- 
land by successive crops of rape, eaten down by sheep, is entirely 
the invention of Mr. F. Smyth. 
Alany commons, partly composed of peat-lands, have been 
inclosed in this district during the past half-century. !Mucli of 
the dry brown lands of these have been broken up and cultivated. 
So many crops of oats have usually been taken from this sort of 
land as to leave it in a worse state than before it was inclosed. 
Until !Mr. SmyUi introduced these lime-grown rape-crops, 
every other known method of reclaiming black-peat lands failed 
to produce the immediate return that would justify a farmer in 
breaking them up, and they for the most part remained in their 
wild state. 
Nothing on these hills feeds sheep so surelv and so rapidly as 
this rape-crop. Sheep turned on it have been known to increase 
in value from ?>s. to 4s. a week, and on an average may be calcu- 
lated to gain 2s. in that time. * 
This rape-reclamation system was discovered at a time when 
the demand for meat for the supply of distant markets was 
encouraging the hill-farmers to grow mutton as well as wool. 
In the good old times, wool was the principal object of the 
farmers on the hills adjoining Exmoor ; and mutton, as in Nor- 
folk, when Mr. Coke commenced his agricultural revolution, was 
only a secondary consideration. This was not extraordinary 
when the only markets were local markets, which might on any 
market-day be glutted by an extra flock of fat sheep. Under 
these circumstances, ewes and wethers alike were frequently kept 
on the commons until they died of old age. As each parish in 
the hill-district was, and is, entitled to pasturage on the manorial 
wastes in proportion to the number of stock kept during the 
winter, it was every farmer's interest to keep as many as possible, 
however thin, so long as they were kept alive. This system, if 
