Exmoor Reclamation, 
91 
carcasses hung in meat-vans provided for the purpose by the 
Great Western Railway ; and they are delivered in the Metropo- 
litan Market quite as soon as carcasses killed within 50 miles of 
London ; and the meat is in special demand from the flavour 
imparted to it by the manner in which the lambs are fed. 
It will be seen from the preceding description, drawn up on 
Exmoor itself, that under this, the third and last experiment, the 
feeding of sheep and lambs, with the help of rape-crops and lime- 
dressing, actually converts wild moorland, if dry, into permanent 
pasture without further expense ; and that this pasture can be 
maintained in good condition by periodical dressings of lime 
without any other manure. On my first visit to Exmoor 
twenty-five years ago, some beautifully green water-meadows 
existed near Simon's Bath. Others have since been made, but 
not in the proportion that might have been expected. Looking 
at the numerous hill-side springs and brooks, each offering the 
utmost natural facilities for successful irrigation, more might 
easily have been done. The brilliant verdure of the existing 
meadows shows that the water need only be distributed over the 
hill-sides to produce a most profitable return for cost and labour. 
It is a point worth noting that the Exmoor pastures never rot 
sheep. Couch-grass does not exist on Exmoor, and so grassy 
is the soil that a well limed fallow will find its way into good 
permanent pasture without a grass-seed being sown on it. 
Mr. Knight has lately been sowing some of " the thousand- 
headed kale," the virtues of which have recently been made 
known by Mr. Robert Russell, of Farningham, in Kent. Mr. 
Russell, by careful selection of seed, has succeeded in vastly 
improving a cattle-food which has been known in Yorkshire for 
half a century.* If this kale succeeds on Exmoor, it will fill up 
a gap between November and Midsummer, after rape has died 
out and before it comes in again. 
In 1873-4 the success of the new system of sheep-farming on 
Exmoor, with its attendant green crops of rape, had made urgent 
the necessity of breaking-up and subsoiling extensive tracts of 
wet peat-land, and converting them into permanent pasture. 
Already a great break had been made in North Devon agri- 
cultural customs by the introduction on the hills of such advanced 
implements as iron wheeled ploughs, mowing machines, and hay- 
making machines. The time seemed to have arrived for trying 
if steam could not do quickly, effectively, and economically, what 
ox-teams had done slowly and expensively in 1824, 
♦ Soyer, the celebrated cook, mentions, in his book published in 1863, seeing 
the " thousand heads " ^own in Yorkshire for feeding sheep ; but Messrs. Sutton, 
the seedsmen, of Eeading, tell me that the modern reputation of this " kale " as 
sheep-food is due to the pains bestowed on it by Messrs. Eussell in selecting tha 
best seed. 
