West Riding of Yorkshire. 
307 
prietors undertaking drainage works themselves, and charging 
such an additional rent as shall pay a compensating interest on 
all the cost. 
Over the great proportion of the land on the coal-measures, 
the alluvial, the millstone grit, and some of the new red sand- 
stone formation, the first step to a higher state of culture requires 
yet to be taken — that of a systematic and effective course of per- 
manent drainage ; and until this is done it will be folly in the 
generality of the occupiers of those lands making any great effort 
at a higher course of cultivation. In those instances where the 
drainage has been thoroughly and properly done, it has proved to 
every observer that the lands of the coal and millstone-grit 
possess, when suitably dry, productive powers of the highest 
order. We may instance much of the strong soil on Mr. Went- 
worth's estate at Woolley, where turnips are now being grown 
and eaten on, upon land that but very recently produced nothing 
beyond precarious crops of wheat and beans. And again, the 
still stronger and poorer land of Mr. Paley, at Harrowgate, 
which but a few years ago was sufficient during one-half of the 
year to produce an ague-fit, and the other half resembled a demi- 
burnt brick, and is now growing abundant crops of turnips, 
wheat, clover, and wheat. It is curious, too, to observe on this 
land the vigorous and renewed growth of the hedges and young 
trees, which has manifested itself since the drainage has been 
done, and is the more palpable from the evidently water-logged 
appearance they previously exhibited. 
There is a great deal, too, of what is usually esteemed dry 
land that would be much improved by a judicious course of 
drainage ; and there is still more of it that would be benefited 
by the application of the subsoil-plough. I have no doubt, when 
Mr. C. Charnock commenced subsoiling and trench-ploughing 
the limestone land of his Holmfield farm, he was laughed at, and 
condemned for so absurd and apparently useless an expenditure ; 
but the practical result has shown that he exercised, from obser- 
vation, sound reasoning on the effects the operation would pro- 
duce ; while they who laughed had not. Last autumn, when 
inspecting some drainage in the North Riding, I observed, from 
a considerable distance, that one side of a large field presented a 
very much browner appearance than the other — .so much so, in- 
deed, as to make me at first think it had been ploughed out. 
On coming nearer, however, I saw this was not the case ; and 
knowing that the subsoil changed very abruptly in the middle of 
the field, from a dry porous marl to a strong retentive clay, the 
cause of the brown appearance was soon manifest. That side was 
the wet clay portion of the field, and which I had previously seen 
saturated with water ; the other was the dry side on the marl, the 
