254 
Farming of Oxfordshire. 
produce underwood, which is cut at from eight to twelve years 
growth, and fetches from 4/. to 8/. an acre. The underwood is 
principally employed in the manufacture of split hurdles, while 
the smaller sprays are used for wicker or flake hurdles, hay- 
cages, thatcher's stuff, faggots, and kindlers. Oak is the prin- 
cipal timber grown in conjunction with the underwood. 
In the Chiltern district where flints abound, the roads are 
mostly kept in famous repair, but between the gravel beds at the 
foot of the hills and Oxford, the materials for making roads are 
very inferior. The coral rag when applied for road-making 
soon resolves itself into dust or white paste. Indeed two roads 
that enter Oxford from the south-east are a disgrace to any city. 
One is actually unsafe, and the other is full of holes. Such 
roads might have served A^ery well in the times of Boadicea, but 
we look for something rather better in the days of Queen 
Victoria. North of the city, the quartz pebbles that are found 
in the elevated beds of the Oxford clay, when broken, make 
excellent roads ; but when thrown in without breaking, they roll 
about all the summer, as their spherical form unfits them for 
binding. A mixture of these pebbles with the hardest sorts of 
live stone does very well. In the stonebrash districts the roads 
are generally wide and open, and therefore soon dry. Thus the 
stone has a better chance than if the roads were narrower, or 
more enclosed. About Banbury, the inferior oolite produces 
such wretched materials for road mal.ing, that the turapikes are 
repaired with granite or Hartshill stone. On some clay farms 
remote from public highways, the field-roads are always bad, 
and at times impassable. A hard road up to a farm is noTvery 
common, while the state of the drifts to the fields is something 
fearful. It would be next to impossible to cart any i"oot-crops 
to tlie steading in the winter. The gateways between fields, or 
leading to the cow-houses, on some clay meadow grounds, are so 
bad, that occasionally cows are stranded in their passage, and 
have to be hauled out of their miry bed by a team of horses. 
A well arranged and convenient farm-steading is quite a 
wonder in Oxfordshire. Tiie buildings, for the most part, are 
grouped in the most admired confusion round an irregular 
enclosed space called a yard. It would appear, from an inspec- 
tion of many of the homesteads, that our ancestors thought a 
yard was not complete without a pond in it to catch the drainings 
from the manure, that a cart-shed must open into a straw-yard, 
that pigsties should face to the north, that barns should be 
placed on the south, and thus throw their dull shadoAV over a 
yard not boasting of a single open shed for cattle. Nor are 
these evils easily got rid of. There are the buildings, and rear- 
ing new ones is an expensive affair. It seldom happens that 
