Chapter 10

THE SOIL AND THE COUNTRYSIDE

In this chapter we want to put together much of what we have learned about the different kinds of soil, so that as we go about the country we may know what to look for on a clay soil, a sandy soil, and so on.

We have seen that clay holds water and is very wet and sticky in winter, while in summer it becomes hard and dry, and is liable to crack badly. "It greets a' winter and girns a' summer," as one of Dr John Brown's characters said of his soil. Clay soils are therefore hard to dig and expensive to cultivate: the farmer calls them heavy and usually prefers to put them into grass because once the grass is up it lasts as long as it is wanted and never needs to be resown. But in the days when we grew our own wheat, before we imported it from the United States and other countries, this clay land was widely cultivated for wheat and beans. So long as wheat was 60/- to 100/- a quarter it was a very profitable crop, but, when some forty years ago it fell to 40/- and then lower still, the land either went out of cultivation like the "derelict" farms of Essex, or it was changed to grass land and used for cattle grazing. Great was the distress that followed; some districts indeed were years in recovering. But new methods came in: the land near London was used for dairy {101} farming, and elsewhere it was improved for grazing, and the clay districts, although completely changed, are now more prosperous again. Many of the fields still show the ridges or "lands" in which, when they grew wheat, they were laid up to let the water run away, and many of them keep their old names, but these are the only relics of the old days. The land is not, and never was, very valuable. The roads are wide, and on either side have wide waste strips cut up roughly by horse tracks, cart ruts and ant hills. Bracken, gorse, rushes, thistles and brambles grow there, and you may find many fine blackberries in September. The coarse Aira grass is found with its leaves as rough as files. The villages are often built round greens which serve as the village playground, where the boys and young men now play cricket and football, and their forefathers practised archery, played quoits and other games. On a few village greens the Maypole can still be seen, whilst the stocks in which offenders were placed are also left in some places.

The hedges are often high and straggling, and there are numerous woods and plantations containing much oak. Some of the woods are very ancient and probably form part of the primeval forests that once largely covered England. Epping Forest in Essex, the Forest of Blean and the King's Wood in Kent, have probably never been cultivated land. In the days when ships were made of oak these woods and hedges were very valuable, but now they are of little use as sources of timber. Instead they are valued for quite another reason: they afford shelter for foxes and for game birds. The clay districts are and always have been famous for fox hunting; the Pytchley, Quorn, Belvoir, {102} and other celebrated packs have their homes in the broad, clay, grassy vales of the Midlands. The vale of Blackmoor and other clay regions are equally famous. The plantations and hedgerows are fine places for primroses and foxgloves, while in the pastures, and especially the poor pastures, are found the ox-eyed daisy and quaking grass, that make such fine nosegays, as well as that sure sign of poverty, the yellow rattle. But many of these poor pastures have been improved by draining, liming, and the use of suitable manures. Although the roads are better than they were (see p. 30) they are still often bad and lie wet for weeks together in winter, especially where the hedges are high. Numerous brick and tile yards may be found and iron ore is not uncommon; in some places it is worked now, in others it is no longer worked and nothing remains of the lost industry save only a few names of fields, of ponds, or of cottages.

A sandy soil is in so many ways the opposite of a clay soil that we shall expect to find corresponding differences in the look of the country. A sandy soil does not hold water: it may get water up from the subsoil to supply the plant (see p. 66), or, if it happens to lie in a basin of clay, it may even be very wet: otherwise it is likely to be too dry for ordinary plants. We may therefore look out for two sorts of sand country, the one cultivated because there is enough water for the crops, and the other not cultivated because the water is lacking. These can readily be found.

We will study the cultivated sands first. As sand is not good plant food (p. 43) these soils want a lot of manure, and so are not good for ordinary farmers. But they are very easy to cultivate--for which reason they {104} are called light soils--and can be dug at any time; seeds can be sown early, and early crops can be got. Consequently these soils are very useful for men doing special work like fattening winter and spring sheep, or producing special crops like fruit or potatoes, and for market gardeners who grow all sorts of vegetables, carrots, parsnips, potatoes, peas, and so on. Fig. 47 is a view of a highly cultivated sandy region in Kent showing gooseberries in the foreground, vegetables behind, and a hop garden behind that again.

The uncultivated sands are sometimes not really so very different, and some of them, perhaps many of them, might be improved or reclaimed and made to grow these special crops if it were worth while. But they always require special treatment and therefore they have been left alone. In days of old our ancestors disliked them very much; "villanous, rascally heaths" Cobbett always called them. There were practically no villages and few cottages, because the land was too barren to produce enough food; the few dwellers on the heath, or the "heathen," were so ignorant and benighted that the name came to stand generally for all such people and has remained in our language long after its original meaning was lost. As there were so few inhabitants the heaths used to be great places for robbers, highwaymen, and evil-doers generally; Gad's Hill on the Watling St. between Rochester and Gravesend, Finchley Common, Hounslow Heath and others equally dreaded by travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were barren sandy tracts. But in our time we no longer need to dread them; we can enjoy the infinite charm of the breezy, open country with its brown vegetation, the pink blossom of the bell-shaped heath and the lilac blossom of the {106} heather, the splashes of yellow from the ragwort or the gorse and the dark pine and larch plantations. In the spring the young shoots of bracken lend a beautiful light green colour to the scene, while in the autumn the faded growth covers it all with a rich brown. People now like to live amid such surroundings, and so these heaths, that have been untouched for so long and are part of the original primeval England as it was in the days of the Britons, are becoming dotted with red bricked and red tiled villas, and are fast losing their ancient character. The heaths are not everywhere dry; there are numerous clay basins where the sand lies wet, where peat forms (see p. 37), and where marsh plants like the bog asphodel, sundew, or cotton grass can be found. In walking over a heath you soon learn to find these wet places by the colour of the grass and the absence of heather. In some places there is a good deal of wood, especially pines, larches, and silver birches: all these are very common on the Surrey sands, willows also grow in the damp places. Fig. 48 shows a Surrey heath--Blackheath--with heather, gorse and bracken; with pine-woods in the distance and everywhere some bare patches of sand. Much of the New Forest is on the sand, as also is Bournemouth, famous for its fine pine woods. Fig. 49 is a view of such woods on Wimbledon common. But elsewhere there is no wood: the peasants burn the turf, and so you find their cottages have huge fireplaces: instead of fences round their gardens or round the plantations there are walls made of turf. Such are the Dorchester heaths so finely described by Hardy in _The Return of the Native_ and other novels. Other sands, however, are covered with grass and not with heather, and many of these have a special value {108} for golf links, especially some of the dry, invigorating sands by the seaside. The famous links at St Andrews, and at Littlestone, are examples.

In between the fertile and the barren sands come a number that are cultivated without being very good. They are much like the others, carrying a vegetation that is usually of the narrow leaved type (p. 72), and not very dense. On the road sides you see broom, heather, heath, harebells, along with gorse and bracken with milkwort nestling underneath: crested dog's tail and sheep's fescue are common grasses, while spurrey, knotwood, corn marigold, are a few of the numerous weeds in the arable fields. Gardens are easily dug, but it is best to put into them only those plants that, like the native vegetation, can withstand drought: vegetable gardens must be well manured and well limed. Fig. 50 shows some of this kind of country in Surrey, the barley field is surrounded by wood and very poor grass on the higher slopes.

It is easy to travel in a sand country because the roads dry very quickly after rain, although they may be dusty in summer. Sometimes the lanes are sunk rather deeply in the soft sand, forming very pretty banks on either side.

Loams, as we have seen (p. 2), lie in between sands and clays: they are neither very wet nor very dry: not too heavy nor yet too light: they are very well suited to our ordinary farm crops, and they form by far the best soils for general farming; wheat, oats, barley, sheep, cattle, milk, fruit and vegetables can all be produced: indeed the farmer on a good loam is in the fortunate position of being able to produce almost anything he finds most profitable. In a loam district that does not {110} lie too high the land is generally all taken up, even the roads are narrow and there are few commons. The hedges are straight and cut short, the farm houses and buildings are well kept, and there is a general air of prosperity all round. Good elms grow and almost any tree that is planted will succeed. Loams shade off on one side into sand; the very fertile sands already described might quite truly be called sandy loams. On the other side they shade off into clays; the heavy loams used to be splendid wheat soils, but are now, like clays, often of little value. But they form pleasant, undulating country, nicely wooded, and dotted over with thatched cottages; the fields are less wet and the roads are rather better than on the clays. When properly managed they make excellent grass land.

Chalky soils stand out quite sharply from all others: their white colour, their lime kilns now often disused, their noble beech trees, and, above all, the great variety of flowering plants enable the traveller at once to know that he is on the chalk. Many plants like chalk and these may be found in abundance, but some, such as foxgloves, heather, broom or rhododendrons cannot tolerate it at all, and so they will not grow.

Chalk, like sand, is dry, and the roads can be traversed very soon after rain. They are not very good, however; often they are only mended with flints, which occur in the chalk and are therefore easily obtainable, and the sharp fragments play sad havoc with bicycle tyres. The bye roads and lanes are often narrow, winding, and worn deep especially at the foot of the hills, so that the banks get a fair amount of moisture and carry a dense vegetation. Among the profusion of flowers you can find scabious, the bedstraws, vetches, ragwort, {111} figwort, and many a plant rare in other places, like the wild orchids; while the cornfields are often yellow with charlock. In the hedgerows are hazels, guelder roses, maples, dogwood, all intwined with long trails of bryony and traveller's joy. In the autumn the traveller's joy produces the long, hairy tufts that have earned for it the name of old man's beard, while the guelder roses bear clusters of red berries. The great variety of flowers attracts a corresponding variety of butterflies, moths and other insects; there are also numbers of birds and rabbits--indeed a chalk country teems with life in spite of the bare look of the Downs. The roads running at the foot of the chalk Downs and connecting the villages, and farmhouses built there for the good water supply, are particularly rich in plants because they sometimes cut into the chalk and sometimes into the neighbouring clay, sand or rock. Now and then a spring bursts out and a little stream takes its rise: if you follow it you will generally find watercress cultivated somewhere.

Besides the beech trees you also find ash, sycamore, maples, and, in the church yards, some venerable yews. Usually the chalk districts were inhabited very early: they are dry and healthy, the land can be cultivated and the heights command extensive views over the country, so that approaching enemies could easily be seen. On the chalk downs and plains are found many remains of tribes that lived there in the remote ages of the past, whose very names are now lost. Strange weapons and ornaments are sometimes dug up in the camps where they lived and worked; the barrows can be seen in which they were buried, and the temples in which they worshipped; Stonehenge itself, the best known of all these, lies on the chalk. {112} Several of the camps still keep the name the ancient Britons gave them--the _Mai-dun_, the encampment on the hill, changed in the course of years to Maiden, as in Maiden Hill, near Dorchester, in Dorset, Maiden Bower, near Dunstable, and so on. Some of their roads are still in use to this day, the Icknield Way (the way of the Iceni, a Belgic tribe), the Pilgrim's Way of the southern counties and others.

Even the present villages go back to very ancient times, and the churches are often seven or eight hundred years old.

In places the land is too steep or too elevated to be cultivated, and so it is left as pasture for the sheep or "sheep walk"; where cultivation is possible the fields are large and without hedges, like those shown in Fig. 51; during autumn, winter and spring there are many sheep about, penned or "folded" on the arable land, eating the crops of swedes, turnips, rape, vetches or mustard grown for them, or grazing on the aftermath of sainfoin or grass and clover. So important are sheep in chalk districts that the whole scheme of farming is often based on their requirements, but corn is also a valuable crop, and, especially in dry districts, barley, so that chalk soils are often spoken of as "sheep and barley" soils. Although the pastures are very healthy there is not generally much food or "keep" for the animals during the summer because of the dryness.

The black soil of the fen districts and elsewhere is widely different from any of the preceding. It contains, as its colour shows, a large quantity of combustible material (Chap. V.), which has a great power of holding water. These fens are therefore very wet; until they were drained they were desolate wastes: you may {114} read in Kingsley's _Hereward the Wake_ what they used to be like in old days, and even as late as 1662 Dugdale writes that here "no element is good. The air cloudy, gross and full of rotten harrs[1]; water putrid and muddy, yea, full of loathsome vermin; the earth spongy and boggy; and the fire noisome by the stink of smoking hassocks[2]." But during the Stuart period wide ditches or drains were dug, into which the water could flow and be pumped into rivers. This reclamation has been continued to the present time, and the black soils as well as the others in the Fen districts can be made very productive.

We have seen that a change in the soil produces a change in the plants that grow on it. The flora (i.e. the collection of plants) of a clay soil is quite different from that of a sandy soil, and both are different from that of a chalk or of a fen soil. In like manner draining a meadow or manuring it alters its flora: some of the plants disappear and new ones come in. Even an operation like mowing a lawn, if carried on sufficiently regularly, causes a change. In all these cases the plants favoured by the new conditions are enabled to grow rather better than those that are less favoured; thus in the regularly mown lawn the short growing grasses have an advantage over those like brome that grow taller, and so crowd them out. When land is drained those plants that like a great quantity of water no longer do quite so well as before, while those that cannot put up with much water now have a better chance. In the natural state there is a great deal of competition among {115} plants, and only those survive that are adapted to their surroundings. You should remember this on your rambles and when you see a plant growing wild you should think of it as one that has succeeded in the competition and try to find out why it has been enabled to do so.

[1] Harr is an old word meaning sea-fog.

[2] Hassock is the name given to coarse grass which forms part of the turf burnt in the cottages.

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