Part 3

I slept at a Dairy-farm house at Hannington, about eight miles from Swindon, and five on one side of my road. I passed through that villanous hole, Cricklade, about two hours ago; and, certainly, a more rascally looking place I never set my eyes on. I wished to avoid it, but could get along no other way. All along here the land is a whitish stiff loam upon a bed of soft stone, which is found at various distances from the surface, sometimes two feet and sometimes ten. Here and there a field is fenced with this stone, laid together in walls without mortar or earth. All the houses and out-houses are made of it, and even covered with the thinnest of it formed into tiles. The stiles in the fields are made of large flags of this stone, and the gaps in the hedges are stopped with them.--There is very little wood all along here. The labourers seem miserably poor. Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds, and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground _on the road side_, where the space has been wider than the road demanded. In many places they have not two rods to a hovel. It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the road side! Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this: no, not even amongst the free negroes in America, who, on an average, do not work one day out of four. And this is "_prosperity_," is it? These, Oh, Pitt! are the fruits of thy hellish system! However, this _Wiltshire_ is a horrible county. This is the county that the _Gallon-loaf_ man belongs to. The land all along here is good. Fine fields and pastures all around; and yet the cultivators of those fields so miserable! This is particularly the case on both sides of Cricklade, and in it too, where everything had the air of the most deplorable want.--They are sowing wheat all the way from the Wiltshire downs to Cirencester; though there is some wheat up. Winter-Vetches are up in some places, and look very well.--The turnips of both kinds are good all along here.--I met a farmer going with porkers to Highworth market. They would weigh, he said, four score and a half, and he expected to get 7_s._ 6_d._ a score. I expect he will not. He said they had been fed on barley-meal; but I did not believe him. I put it to his honour whether whey and beans had not been their food. He looked surly, and pushed on.--On this stiff ground they grow a good many beans, and give them to the pigs with whey; which makes excellent pork for the _Londoners_; but which must meet with a pretty hungry stomach to swallow it in Hampshire. The hogs, all the way that I have come, from Buckinghamshire, are, without a single exception that I have seen, the old-fashioned black-spotted hogs. Mr. BLOUNT at Uphusband has one, which now weighs about thirty score, and will possibly weigh forty, for she moves about very easily yet. This is the weight of a good ox; and yet, what a little thing it is compared to an ox! Between Cricklade and this place (Cirencester) I met, in separate droves, about two thousand Welsh Cattle, on their way from Pembrokeshire to the fairs in Sussex. The greater part of them were heifers in calf. They were purchased in Wales at from 3_l._ to 4_l._ 10_s._ each! None of them, the drovers told me, reached 5_l._ These heifers used to fetch, at home, from 6_l._ to 8_l._, and sometimes more. Many of the things that I saw in these droves did not fetch, in Wales, 25_s._ And they go to no _rising_ market! Now, is there a man in his senses who believes that this THING can go on in the present way? However, a fine thing, indeed, is this fall of prices! My "cottager" will easily get his cow, and a young cow too, for less than the 5_l._ that I talked of. These Welsh heifers will calve about May; and they are just the very thing for a cottager.

_Gloucester, Thursday (morning), Nov. 8._

In leaving Cirencester, which is a pretty large town, a pretty nice town, and which the people call _Cititer_, I came up hill into a country, apparently formerly a down or common, but now divided into large fields by stone walls. Anything so ugly I have never seen before. The stone, which, on the other side of Cirencester, lay a good way under ground, here lies very near to the surface. The plough is continually bringing it up, and thus, in general, come the means of making the walls that serve as fences. Anything quite so cheerless as this I do not recollect to have seen; for the Bagshot country, and the commons between Farnham and Haslemere, have _heath_ at any rate; but these stones are quite abominable. The turnips are not a _fiftieth_ of a crop like those of Mr. Clarke at Bergh-Apton in Norfolk, or Mr. Pym at Reigate in Surrey, or of Mr. Brazier at Worth in Sussex. I see thirty acres here that have less _food_ upon them than I saw the other day upon half an acre at Mr. Budd's at Berghclere. _Can_ it be good farming to plough and sow and hoe thirty acres to get what _may_ be got upon half an acre? Can that half acre cost more than a tenth part as much as the thirty acres? But if I were to go to this thirty-acre farmer, and tell him what to do to the half acre, would he not exclaim with the farmer at Botley: "What! _drow_ away all that 'ere ground between the _lains_! Jod's blood!"--With the exception of a little dell about eight miles from Cititer, this miserable country continued to the distance of ten miles, when, all of a sudden, I looked down from the top of a high hill into _the vale of Gloucester_! Never was there, surely, such a contrast in this world! This hill is called _Burlip Hill_; it is much about a mile down it, and the descent so steep as to require the wheel of the chaise to be locked; and even with that precaution, I did not think it over and above safe to sit in the chaise; so, upon Sir Robert Wilson's principle of taking care of _Number One_, I got out and walked down. From this hill you see the Morvan Hills in Wales. You look down into a sort of _dish_ with a flat bottom, the Hills are the sides of the dish, and the City of Gloucester, which you plainly see, at seven miles distance from Burlip Hill, appears to be not far from the centre of the dish. All here is fine; fine farms; fine pastures; all enclosed fields; all divided by hedges; orchards a plenty; and I had scarcely seen one apple since I left Berkshire.--GLOUCESTER is a fine, clean, beautiful place; and, which is of a vast deal more importance, the labourers' dwellings, as I came along, looked good, and the labourers themselves pretty well as to dress and healthiness. The girls at work in the fields (always my standard) are not in rags, with bits of shoes tied on their feet and rags tied round their ankles, as they had in Wiltshire.

JOURNAL: FROM GLOUCESTER, TO BOLLITREE IN HEREFORDSHIRE, ROSS, HEREFORD, ABINGDON, OXFORD, CHELTENHAM, BERGHCLERE, WHITCHURCH, UPHURSTBOURN, AND THENCE TO KENSINGTON.

_Bollitree Castle, Herefordshire, Friday, 9 Nov. 1821._

I got to this beautiful place (Mr. WILLIAM PALMER'S) yesterday, from Gloucester. This is in the parish of _Weston_, two miles on the Gloucester side of Ross, and, if not the first, nearly the first, parish in Herefordshire upon leaving Gloucester to go on through Ross to Hereford.--On quitting Gloucester I crossed the Severne, which had overflowed its banks and covered the meadows with water.--The soil good but stiff. The coppices and woods very much like those upon the clays in the South of Hampshire and in Sussex; but the land better for corn and grass. The goodness of the land is shown by the apple-trees, and by the sort of sheep and cattle fed here. The sheep are a cross between the Ryland and Leicester, and the cattle of the Herefordshire kind. These would starve in the pastures of any part of Hampshire or Sussex that I have ever seen.--At about seven miles from Gloucester I came to hills, and the land changed from the whitish soil, which I had hitherto seen, to a red brown, with layers of flat stone of a reddish cast under it. Thus it continued to Bollitree. The trees of all kinds are very fine on the hills as well as in the bottoms.--The spot where I now am is peculiarly well situated in all respects. The land very rich, the pastures the finest I ever saw, the trees of all kinds surpassing upon an average any that I have before seen in England. From the house, you see, in front and winding round to the left, a lofty hill, called _Penyard Hill_, at about a mile and a half distance, covered with oaks of the finest growth: along at the foot of this wood are fields and orchards continuing the slope of the hill down for a considerable distance, and, as the ground lies in a sort of _ridges_ from the wood to the foot of the slope, the hill-and-dell is very beautiful. One of these dells with the two adjoining sides of hills is an orchard belonging to Mr. PALMER, and the trees, the ground, and everything belonging to it, put me in mind of the most beautiful of the spots in the North of Long Island. Sheltered by a lofty wood; the grass fine beneath the fruit trees; the soil dry under foot though the rain had scarcely ceased to fall; no moss on the trees; the leaves of many of them yet green; everything brought my mind to the beautiful orchards near Bayside, Little Neck, Mosquito Cove, and Oyster Bay, in Long Island. No wonder that this is a country of _cider_ and _perry_; but what a shame it is that here, at any rate, the owners and cultivators of the soil, not content with these, should, for mere fashion's sake, waste their substance on _wine_ and _spirits_! They really deserve the contempt of mankind and the curses of their children.--The woody hill mentioned before, winds away to the left, and carries the eye on to the _Forest of Dean_, from which it is divided by a narrow and very deep valley. Away to the right of Penyard Hill lies, in the bottom, at two miles distance, and on the bank of the river Wye, the town of Ross, over which we look down the vale to Monmouth and see the Welsh hills beyond it. Beneath Penyard Hill, and on one of the _ridges_ before mentioned, is the parish church of Weston, with some pretty white cottages near it, peeping through the orchard and other trees; and coming to the paddock before the house are some of the largest and loftiest trees in the country, standing singly here and there, amongst which is the very largest and loftiest walnut-tree that I believe I ever saw, either in America or in England. In short, there wants nothing but the autumnal _colours_ of the American trees to make this the most beautiful spot I ever beheld.--I was much amused for an hour after daylight this morning in looking at the _clouds_, rising at intervals from the dells on the side of Penyard Hill, and flying to the top, and then over the Hill. Some of the clouds went up in a roundish and compact form. Others rose in a sort of string or stream, the tops of them going over the hill before the bottoms were clear of the place whence they had arisen. Sometimes the clouds gathered themselves together along the top of the hill, and seemed to connect the topmost trees with the sky.----I have been to-day to look at Mr. PALMER'S fine crops of _Swedish Turnips_, which are, in general, called "_Swedes_." These crops having been raised according to _my plan_, I feel, of course, great interest in the matter. The Swedes occupy two fields: one of thirteen, and one of seventeen acres. The main part of the seventeen-acre field was _drilled_, on ridges, four feet apart, a single row on a ridge, at different times, between 16th April and 29th May. An acre and a half of this piece was _transplanted_ on four-feet ridges 30th July. About half an acre across the middle of the field was sown _broad-cast_ 14th April.--In the thirteen-acre field there is about half an acre sown _broad-cast_ on the 1st of June; the rest of the field was _transplanted_; part in the first week of June, part in the last week of June, part from the 12th to 18th July, and the rest (about three acres) from 21st to 23rd July. The drilled Swedes in the seventeen-acre field, contain full 23 tons to the acre; the transplanted ones in _that_ field, 15 tons, and the broad-cast not exceeding 10 tons. Those in the thirteen-acre field which were transplanted before the 21st July, contain 27 if not 30 tons; and the rest of _that_ field about 17 tons to the acre. The broad-cast piece here (half an acre) may contain 7 tons. The shortness of my time will prevent us from ascertaining the weight by actual weighings; but such is the crop, according to the best of my judgment, after a very minute survey of it in every part of each field.--NOW, here is a little short of 800 tons of food, about a fifth part of which consists of _tops_; and, of course, there is about 640 tons of _bulb_. As to the _value_ and _uses_ of this prodigious crop I need say nothing; and as to the time and manner of sowing and raising the plants for transplanting, the act of transplanting, and the after cultivation, Mr. PALMER has followed the directions contained in my "_Year's Residence in America_;" and, indeed, he is forward to acknowledge that he had never thought of this mode of culture, which he has followed now for three years, and which he has found so advantageous, until he read that work, a work which the _Farmer's Journal_ thought proper to treat as a _romance_.--Mr. PALMER has had some _cabbages_ of the large, drum-head kind. He had about three acres, in rows at four feet apart, and at little less than three feet apart in the rows, making _ten thousand_ cabbages on the three acres. He kept ninety-five wethers and ninety-six ewes (large fatting sheep) upon them for _five weeks_ all but two days, ending in the first week of November. The sheep, which are now feeding off yellow turnips in an adjoining part of the same field, come back over the cabbage-ground and _scoop out the stumps_ almost to the ground in many cases. This ground is going to be ploughed for wheat immediately. Cabbages are a very fine _autumn crop_; but it is the _Swedes_ on which you must rely for the spring, and on _housed_ or _stacked_ Swedes too; for they will _rot_ in many of our winters, if left in the ground. I have had them rot myself, and I saw, in March 1820, hundreds of acres rotten in Warwickshire and Northamptonshire. Mr. PALMER greatly prefers the _transplanting_ to the drilling. It has numerous advantages over the drilling; greater regularity of crop, greater certainty, the only _sure_ way of avoiding the _fly_, greater crop, admitting of two months later preparation of land, can come _after vetches_ cut up for horses (as, indeed, a part of Mr. PALMER'S transplanted Swedes did), and requiring less labour and expense. I asserted this in my "_Year's Residence_;" and Mr. PALMER, who has been very particular in ascertaining the fact, states positively that the expense of transplanting is not so great as the hoeing and setting out of the drilled crops, and not so great as the common hoeings of broad-cast. This, I think, settles the question. But the advantages of the wide-row culture by no means confine themselves to the green and root crop; for Mr. PALMER drills his wheat upon the same ridges, without ploughing, after he has taken off the Swedes. He drills it at _eight inches_, and puts in from eight to ten gallons to the acre. His crop of 1820, drilled in this way, averaged 40 bushels to the acre; part drilled in November, and part so late as February. It was the common Lammas wheat. His last crop of wheat is not yet ascertained; but it was better after the Swedes than in any other of his land. His manner of taking off the crop is excellent. He first cuts off and carries away the _tops_. Then he has an implement, drawn by two oxen, walking on each side of the ridge, with which he cuts off the _tap root_ of the Swedes without disturbing the land of the ridge. Any child can then pull up the bulb. Thus the ground, clean as a garden, and in that compact state which the wheat is well known to like, is ready, at once, for drilling with wheat. As to the _uses_ to which he applies the crop, tops as well as bulbs, I must speak of these hereafter, and in a work of a description different from this. I have been thus particular here, because the _Farmer's Journal_ treated my book as a pack of lies. I know that my (for it is _mine_) system of cattle-food husbandry will finally be that of _all England_, as it already is that of America; but what I am doing here is merely in self-defence against the slanders, the malignant slanders, of the _Farmer's Journal_. Where is a _Whig lord_, who, some years ago, wrote to a gentleman that "_he_ would have _nothing to do_ with any _reform_ that _Cobbett_ was engaged in"? But in spite of the brutal _Journal_, farmers are not such fools as this lord was: they will not reject a good crop because they can have it only by acting upon my plan; and this lord will, I imagine, yet see the day when he will be less averse from having to do with a reform in which "Cobbett" shall be engaged.

_Old Hall, Saturday night, Nov. 10._

Went to Hereford this morning. It was market-day. My arrival became known, and, I am sure, I cannot tell how. A sort of _buz_ got about. I could perceive here, as I always have elsewhere, very ardent friends and very bitter enemies; but all full of curiosity. One thing could not fail to please me exceedingly: my friends were _gay_ and my enemies _gloomy_: the former smiled, and the latter, in endeavouring to screw their features into a sneer, could get them no further than the half sour and half sad: the former seemed in their looks to say, "Here he is," and the latter to respond, "Yes, G---- d---- him!"--I went into the market-place, amongst the farmers, with whom, in general, I was very much pleased. If I were to live in the county two months, I should be acquainted with every man of them. The country is very fine all the way from Ross to Hereford. The soil is always a red loam upon a bed of stone. The trees are very fine, and certainly winter comes later here than in Middlesex. Some of the oak trees are still perfectly green, and many of the ashes as green as in September.--In coming from Hereford to this place, which is the residence of Mrs. PALMER and that of her two younger sons, Messrs. PHILIP and WALTER PALMER, who, with their brother, had accompanied me to Hereford; in coming to this place, which lies at about two miles distance from the great road, and at about an equal distance from HEREFORD and from Ross, we met with something, the sight of which pleased me exceedingly: it was that of a very pretty pleasant-looking lady (and _young_ too) with two beautiful children, riding in a little sort of chaise-cart, drawn by _an ass_, which she was driving in reins. She appeared to be well known to my friends, who drew up and spoke to her, calling her Mrs. _Lock_, or _Locky_ (I hope it was not _Lockart_), or some such name. Her husband, who is, I suppose, some young farmer of the neighbourhood, may well call himself Mr. _Lucky_; for to have such a wife, and for such a wife to have the good sense to put up with an ass-cart, in order to avoid, as much as possible, feeding those cormorants who gorge on the taxes, is a blessing that falls, I am afraid, to the lot of very few rich farmers. Mrs. _Lock_ (if that be her name) is a real _practical radical_. Others of us resort to radical coffee and radical tea; and she has a radical carriage. This is a very effectual way of assailing the THING, and peculiarly well suited for the practice of the female sex. But the self-denial ought not to be imposed on the wife only: the husband ought to set the example: and let me hope that _Mr. Lock_ does not indulge in the use of wine and spirits while Mrs. Lock and her children ride in a jackass gig; for if he do, he wastes, in this way, the means of keeping her a chariot and pair. If there be to be any expense not absolutely necessary; if there be to be anything bordering on extravagance, surely it ought to be for the pleasure of that part of the family who have the least number of objects of enjoyment; and for a husband to indulge himself in the guzzling of expensive, unnecessary, and really injurious drink, to the tune, perhaps, of 50 or 100 pounds a year, while he preaches economy to his wife, and, with a face as long as my arm, talks of the low price of corn, and wheedles her out of a curricle into a jack-ass cart, is not only unjust but _unmanly_.

_Old Hall, Sunday night, 11 Nov._