62 
Farming of Cambridgeshire. 
it remain one whole rotation, if not more, and plough up the laye 
for wheat after the first year of the succeeding course. This would 
bring it into the regular four-course shift or course again after 
four years. 
The Isle of Ely, or Fen District. 
The difficulty I feel in writing on the farming of this county is 
considerably increased in consequence of a large portion of it 
consisting of fen-land, being so different in every respect from any 
other part of the county. But I have, by a careful view of this 
district at various times, and by communications with some of its 
most spirited cultivators, endeavoured to obtain, and I trust have 
obtained, sufficient information on the subject. Yet I feel that 
none but those brought up, living in, and cultivating this district, 
can fairly and fully do justice to it. It is a wonderfully fine dis- 
trict, and one in which more improvement has taken place within 
a few years than in any other. I think a district so important 
deserves and is entitled to a separate Report. 
I will endeavour to give a full account of its original state, as 
described by various writers, and of its state at the present mo- 
ment. Mr. Atkins (a Commissioner of Sewers in the reign of 
James I., 1604) states, that in his opinion the fens were once of 
the nature of land meadows, fruitful, healthful, and very gainful 
to the inhabitants, and yielded much relief to the high-land coun- 
tries in the time of great drought." 
Sir W. Dugdale, about 1644, says, " that great numbers of 
timber-trees grew there, as was plain from many found in digging 
canals and drains, some of them severed from their roots, the 
roots standing as they grew in firm earth below the moor : fir- 
trees at the depth of four and five feet, but the oaks at three ; they 
were found lying in a north-west direction, not cut down, but 
burnt near the ground, as the ends of them being coaled mani- 
fested. The oaks in multitudes of an enormous size, being five 
yards in compass and sixteen long, and some smaller, of a great 
length, with a quantity of acorns near them. About a mile west- 
ward of Magdalen Bridge, in setting down a sluice at seventeen 
feet deep, several furzes, and nut-trees, pressed flat down, with nuts 
firm and sound lying by them, the bushes and trees standing in the 
solid earth below the silt." Dugdale also mentions a gravel cause- 
way three feet deep, supposed to have been made by the Flmperor 
Severus, who was born l46, and died *21 1, from Denver in Norfolk 
to Peterborough in Northampttjnshire, twenty-four miles in length, 
which is now covered with moor five feet in thickness. In deep- 
ening the channtd of Wisbeach River, 163.5, the workmen, at eight 
feet below the then bed of the river, discovered a second bottom, 
