310 
Agricultural Notes on Hertfordshire. 
character — rather a sharp flint-gravel, somewhat under the average 
quality of the district. The whole has been more or less chalked 
from below, according to the custom of this county. The fer- 
tility of the farm is maintained, not by selling off the produce 
and trusting to London and other extraneous sources for an 
equivalent, but by developing and trusting to its own internal 
resources. The following list of animals fatted and sold from 
the farm has been kindly furnished in illustration of the system 
pursued : — 
1862. 
1863. 
Lambs 
. 391 .. 
.. 392 
Slice]) 
333 .. 
.. 356 
Beasts 
(i .. 
5 
Calves 
45 -.. 
.. 50 
Pigs 
205 .. 
.. 198 
Total head 
.. 980 
1001 
On 317 acres of land. 
The system of cropping is four-course, managed with especial 
reference to sheep-stock. Much reliance is placed on the deep 
cultivation of the soil, which is principally effected by the use of 
a two-wheeled plough, divested of its mould-board, which follows 
the first plough, armed with a share copied from that of the 
unwieldy and disused old Hertfordshire plough. Besides the 
usual succession crops of swedes, mangold, mixed layers, tares 
(to be followed by white turnips), it is the practice here to sow 
rape between the rows of beans on the heavier portion of the 
farm. 
A certain portion of the ewe flock, which averages 330 head, 
c onsists of Dorsets, which are put to a Sussex or half-bred ram ; 
both ewe and lamb are generally fatted for sale, and the stock 
replenished from fairs. 
The Chalk District. 
The Northern or chalk district, having a fall anticlinal to the 
dip of the stratum, is drained by streamlets which are the affluents 
of the Cam, the Ouse, and, in one instance, of the Thame. 
This remarkable tract of land may be surveyed looking from 
Sandon, which stands high on a rounded escarpment of the 
outlying Plastic clay. 
On descending from the higher ground, the chalk — here geo- 
logically the lower chalk -without flints — is more thinly covered 
with gravel, and very frequently becomes a part of the cultivated 
tilth. It does not, as in the Vales of Aylesbury and White 
Horse, end in bold escarpments immediately overhanging the 
upper green sand and gault, but sinks to the level of these strata 
