34 
The Agriculture of the Cotswolds. 
and tlie rams are very largely used in East Anglia for mating 
with Suffolk and crossbred ewes. 
The Oxford Down, by which they have been so largely 
displaced, was originally derived from crossing the Cotswold 
ram with the Hampshire Down ewe, which had in turn been 
produced by crossing the old A iltshire and Berkshire breed 
with the Southdown, and has the good qualities of. both its 
parents. The face is dark brown with a topknot, inherited 
from the Cotswold, a close and heavy fleece, and a wide and 
deep body on fairly short legs. It has attained great perfection, 
and is said to bear harder folding and have a greater disposi- 
tion to early maturity than the Cotswold, though this is not 
admitted by the advocates of the latter. Like its parents, it 
possesses a Breed Society and Flock Book. 
The average number of breeding ewes on a hill farm is about 
thirty-five to a hundred acres, and they are generally put to the 
ram about Michaelmas, though ram breeders who wish to get 
their lambs earlier in the year turn out in August. The practice 
of breeding from a few ewe lambs that are timed to produce 
their lambs later is increasing. Lambing takes place in a shelter 
made about a field barn or off farm buildings, or in a temporary 
pen constructed of hurdles and straw in a turnip field that has 
been cropped to provide suitable feed, and to which the ewes 
and lambs have access, returning to the shelter of the fold at 
night, where a rack of seed hay pro’s ides their evening meal. 
Italian rye grass and seeds with roots thrown to them daily 
follow, and the lambs are weaned in July, when they are run 
thinly on lattermath seeds or sainfoin, the ewes being given a 
bite on old seeds or bare pasture to dry up their milk. By 
September early turnips and rape are ready, and these are 
followed by swedes sliced with Gardners turnip cutter, the 
wether lambs being pushed with corn and cake, and sold out 
when ready for the butcher. When plentiful probably about a 
ton of seed hay to the acre is consumed by the sheep on the 
turnip land. The ewes act as scavengers, and clean up what is 
left by the fatting sheep and ewe tegs. 
Although a fair number of horned cattle are reared on the 
Cotswolds, not very many are bred, a few cows only being 
generally kept to provide milk and butter, calves being 
bought from the dairymen of the vale and weaned with those 
that are home bred. They are practically all shorthorns of 
useful quality, and one of my correspondents tells me he 
weans about eighty calves on ten cows, selling them fat about 
thirty months later, when he expects them to fetch 1,600/. 
The production of beef by feeding a number of. bullocks 
through the winter in yards and boxes that prevails in the 
eastern comities is not customary, nearly all the roots being 
