A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

      THE DRIVE FOR CHANGE

      Every department of agriculture was permeated by a new spirit of energy and enterprise. Rents rose, but profits outstripped the rise. New crops were cultivated – swedes, mangel-wurzel, kohl rabi, prickly comfrey, all were readily adopted by a new race of agriculturists. Breeders spent capital freely in improving livestock. New implements were introduced; Meikle’s threshing machine (1784) began to drive out the flail by its economy of human labour. Numerous patents were taken out for drills, reaping, mowing, haymaking and winnowing machines, as well as for horse-rakes, scarifiers, chaff-cutters, turnip-slicers and other mechanical aids to agriculture.

      To one degree or another, virtually every landowner and farmer was caught up in the fever for improvement, fuelled by rocketing food prices. One of the most famous was Thomas Coke of Holkham, 1st Earl of Leicester. When Coke inherited the enormous estates at Holkham, in Norfolk, not an acre of wheat was to be seen from Wells-next-the-Sea to King’s Lynn. At best, the thin sandy soil produced scanty yields of rye, the poorest of the grain crops. Naturally short of fertility, it was further impoverished by a barbarous system of cropping. No manure was purchased, the ground only carried a few Norfolk sheep with backs like razors and, here and there, a few half-starved, semi-wild marsh cattle. Despite what anyone would have considered a hopeless task, Coke was determined to grow wheat. He marled and clayed the land, purchased large quantities of manure, drilled his wheat and turnips, grew sainfoin and clover, and soon trebled his livestock. He also introduced into the county the use of artificial foods like oil-cake, which, with roots, enabled Norfolk farms to carry increased stock. Under his example and advice, stall-feeding (wintering inside) was extensively practised.

      EVERY DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE WAS PERMEATED BY A NEW SPIRIT OF ENERGY AND ENTERPRISE … TO ONE DEGREE OR ANOTHER, VIRTUALLY EVERY LANDOWNER AND FARMER WAS CAUGHT UP IN THE FEVER FOR IMPROVEMENT, FUELLED BY ROCKETING FOOD PRICES.

      Within nine years he was growing a vast acreage of wheat, breeding prize-winning shorthorn cattle and Southdown sheep which he used to cross with hardy Norfolk ewes to produce the Suffolk, without doubt, the most famous fat lamb-producing sheep in the world. In 1778, Coke started inviting local farmers to view his sheep at the annual sheep shearings. These gradually developed into farming seminars where new ideas were discussed and debated. By 1818 open house was kept at Holkham for a week, with hundreds of practical and theoretical agriculturists, farmers from all districts, breeders of every kind of stock, assembling from all parts of Great Britain, the Continent and America. The mornings were spent in inspecting the land and the stock, and at three o’clock as many as 600 people sat down to dinner, spending the rest of each day in discussion, comparing notes and exchanging experiences. Copying Coke’s example, improving landlords in many other parts of England, such as the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, or Lord Egremont at Petworth, began holding similar meetings. These evolved into the county and regional agricultural shows held every year in Britain, of which the most famous are the Great Yorkshire Show, the Royal Highland Show at Edinburgh, the Royal Norfolk Show near Norwich, the Royal Welsh Show at Builth Wells, the Royal Bath and West Show at Shepton Mallet and the Royal Cornwall Agricultural Show.

      To accommodate the need for agricultural expansion, another wave of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts was passed in 1760 and continued almost yearly for the next century, during which three million hectares of common land, mostly heaths, moor and fen, were enclosed. Droves of small subsistence farmers and out-of-work farm labourers and their families left the land. The lucky ones stayed in rural areas and found casual jobs road building, or as navvies planting hedges or building walls for the new enclosures, whilst their wives worked in one of the cottage industries – weaving, knitting hosiery or making gloves. Many thousands gravitated to the mills and iron founaries of the industrial North or emigrated. In the North of England and southern Scotland thousands of acres of marginal upland, heath and moorland was enclosed and let to tenants as sheep-grazing dispossessed the cottars (peasant farmers) and small tenants, who rented a few acres to grow basic crops and had traditionally grazed their few scraggy beasts in the hill valleys. The more enlightened landlords built ‘model’ villages to house those that had moved off the land and established light industry to provide them with employment. The Marquess of Tweeddale built the village of Gifford to accommodate the cottars moved from their small holdings in the Lammermuir Hills. Flax was a popular crop grown in the lowlands and a weaving industry was established in the village with a sunken bleach field in which the made cloth could be steeped in a lye solution to whiten it. Lord Lynedoch built the village of Pitcairngreen for the same purpose, confidently announcing that it would become the Scottish Manchester, and the Duke of Buccleuch built the village of Newcastleton and established a handloom industry. Other dispossessed farming families made their way to the new Scottish industrial towns such as Glasgow or New Lanark.

      THE INFAMOUS CLEARANCES

      The ‘Lowland Clearances’ are scarcely remarked upon by historians compared to the highly emotive and romanticised ‘Highland Clearance’ that started when Highland lairds employed lowland or English agriculturalists to improve their estates. Highlanders in the often heavily overpopulated straths and glens were forced to move to make way for sheep, sometimes under conditions of considerable hardship. Many took the option of emigrating to Canada and America, whilst others were moved to crofting townships on the coast. The thin, acid soil of the Highlands – particularly on the western side proved to be too shallow to sustain large flocks of sheep for long, and numbers were already falling when the first fleeces began arriving from Australia in the 1850s, causing the bottom to fall out of the wool market. As the sheep went, the red deer population increased and stalking started to become part of the increasingly popular Highland sporting experience. This led to the establishment of deer forests as prime land use, and by the end of the nineteenth century the area of land managed as deer forest exceeded two million hectares.

      Graziers who rented hill land first had to clear it of scrub and, on peat soil, old rank heather by slashing and burning, the oldest method of improving ground known to man. Because of the topography of the ground, it was never going to be possible to fence the hills, so the early graziers, appreciating the delicate nature of hill herbage and its susceptibility to overgrazing, devised a method of ‘hefting’ the sheep. Each area of the hill was assessed on its potential sustainable stocking rate and then the number of ewes considered safe was taught to graze on each particular area, known as hefts. The hill breeds are, by nature of the land they live on, almost wild animals and naturally very territorial. This characteristic was an enormous help in the