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

By the late seventeenth century, Britain had colonies in the West Indies, the western seaboard of America and a large part of Canada. The Royal African Company had established trading posts in West Africa to trade slaves in exchange for British goods, which would become the major economic mainstay for such western British cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. The East India Company had been in existence since 1600 and Britain acquired Bombay and Tangier in 1661, on the marriage of Charles II to Catherine de Braganza. When William of Orange ascended the English throne in 1688, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England, a deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England.

One of William’s first acts after his coronation was to declare war on his old enemy, France, and to impose a trade embargo on French goods which was to have a profound effect on British agriculture. In the seventeenth century very little distilling of spirits was known in Britain; the Company of Distillers made spirits under strict regulations, mainly for apothecaries who used it as a base for medicines. Some home-made alcohol was sold by street vendors, described by Daniel Defoe as ‘Foul and gross, but they mixed them up with such additions as they could get, to make them palatable’. The rich drank imported French brandy and the embargo with France left a gap in the booze market, which William promptly filled in 1690 by passing an Act of Parliament ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’.

This new industry would lead, the Act promised, to ‘the greater consumption of corn and the advantage of tillage in this Kingdom’. To help things along, he withdrew the monopoly on distilling from the Company of Distillers, removed virtually all regulations and, working on the theory that if spirits were cheap, more people would drink them, lowered the tax on spirits made from malted corn to a penny a gallon. British farmers now faced the challenge of demand created by colonisation and the new distilling industry; they had to improve production or go out of business.

The eighteenth century was a period of rapid change for every section of society, but none more so than for farmers, with landowners leading the way in agricultural improvements. The four-field rotation system was accepted as the new method of cultivation, the limitation being the hopelessly inefficient method of broadcasting seed by hand. It is obviously important that individual plants have sufficient space to grow and ripen, and there was an enormous amount of waste until Jethro Tull, a Berkshire landowner, invented a seed drill for sowing seed in rows. He also advocated the use of horses instead of oxen, which were still commonly used for farm work, and invented a horse-drawn hoe for clearing plant growth, particularly among turnip crops. The powerful Whig politician, Viscount Townsend, of Raynham Hall, in Norfolk, carried out a variety of improving experiments on his estate, mostly involving turnips. He was a fervent believer in the efficacious qualities of turnips for all agricultural improvements and became known as ‘Turnip Townsend’ from his habit of introducing his opinions of the plant into every conversation.

Joseph Foljambe of Rotherham, in Yorkshire, perfected a vastly superior plough which remained in use until the tractor was invented 170 years later.

DRAUGHT HORSES

In the early part of the century, the Duke of Hamilton imported six black Flemish stallions from Flanders which were crossed with local horses on his estates at Clydesdale, near Glasgow, to produce the eponymous Clydesdale horse. Clydesdales were the perfect multi-purpose work horse, which were eventually exported all over the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were over 140,000 Clydesdales in Scotland alone, and in 1911, 1,600 stallions were exported from Britain to various countries. By 1949, there were just eighty horses registered in Britain, and in 1975 the Rare Breeds Survival Trust listed the breed as ‘vulnerable’. Clydesdales have since seen a resurgence in popularity and population, resulting in the breed’s status being reclassified favourably as ‘at risk’, with an estimated global population of just 5,000 specimens.

At the same time, other landlords, such as the Earls of Chesterfield and Huntington, were developing regional draught horses by importing continental stallions from Zeeland. Later in the century, Robert Bakewell of Derbyshire, the famous improver of cattle and sheep, developed the Improved Black Horse, which was to become world famous as the Shire horse.

NEW ADVANCES IN GOODS TRANSPORTATION

As Britain moved into the age of industry, in the middle of the century, there was a desperate need to find some method of transporting bulky raw materials and finished products. The Toll Pike Trusts set up by Act of Parliament in 1706, with powers to collect road tolls for maintaining the principal highways in Britain, were still in their infancy. Most goods were transported by long trains of pack horses or great cumbersome wagons to the nearest port, on roads which in most places had scarcely improved since the Middle Ages. There had been some early attempts to improve inland river navigation in the seventeenth century; the government of King James established the Oxford-Burcot Commission in 1605 which began a system of locks and weirs on the River Thames and was opened between Oxford and Abingdon by 1635. Sir Richard Weston designed and built the Wey navigations in 1635, a canal running 25 kilometres from Weybridge to Guildford, allowing barges to transport heavy goods via the Thames to London. Timber, corn, flour, wood and gunpowder from the Chilworth Mills were moved up the canal to London whilst coal was brought back. The Aire & Calder Navigation, in West Yorkshire, was opened 1703, the Trent Navigation in 1712, the Kennet in 1723 and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in 1734, which provided a navigable route to Salford and Manchester.

CARVING OUT THE CANALS

These were all improvements to existing rivers; but the first artificial canal, a waterway designed on the basis of where goods needed to go rather than where a river happened to be, was built by the Duke of Bridgewater. The Duke commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal which would transport coal quickly and efficiently from his mines in Worsley to the rapidly industrialising city of Manchester. Brindley’s design included an aqueduct carrying the canal over the River Irwell, and this engineering wonder immediately attracted tourists when it opened in 1761. The Duke’s canal proved to be highly successful; barges carrying thirty tonnes of coal were easily pulled by one horse walking along a tow path – more than ten times the amount of cargo per horse than was possible with a cart. Time spent moving goods was cut to a fraction and, because of the massive increase in supply, the Bridgewater canal reduced the price of coal in Manchester by nearly two-thirds within a year of its opening. It was a huge financial success, earning what had been spent on its construction within just a few years – which was a relief to the Duke, who had funded the whole venture himself.

THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL STARTED A FEVER OF CANAL BUILDING ACROSS THE ENTIRE COUNTRY UNTIL THERE WAS A NATIONWIDE NETWORK OF TRANSPORT COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND WALES, AND IN SCOTLAND, FROM THE SEA PORTS ON THE EAST AND WEST COASTS. IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE UNDERTAKING.

The Bridgewater canal started a fever of canal building across the entire country until there was a nationwide network of transport communication between England and Wales, and in Scotland, from the sea ports on the east and west coasts. It was an incredible undertaking. Armies of ‘navvies’ (as in navigators) laboured under engineering geniuses such as Telford, Brindley, Rennie or Dadford, creating aqueducts, boat lifts, tunnels, inclined planes and caisson lifts.

The new canal system enabled both goods and people to move around the country in a manner that must have seemed incredible compared with the methods of the recent past. Fast ‘Flyboats’, crewed by four men with two working while the other two slept and a system of changing horses, carried urgent cargo and passengers at relatively high speed day and night. Raw materials, fuel and produce could now be moved internally round the country with ease. Heavy cargoes for export, transported along the network linking the coastal port cities such as London, Liverpool, and Bristol, could be exchanged with sea-going ships and imported goods brought back on the return journey. The canals fell into decline as the rail network developed in the mid-nineteenth century, leaving us a legacy of 4,000 miles of waterways, both for recreational use and as a habitat for urban and rural wildlife.

CHANGING THE HIGHWAYS

Although intensely unpopular, income raised by the turnpike trusts was radically improving the condition of Britain’s highways. ‘Turnpike’ alludes to the similarity between the gate used to control access to the road and the weapon used by infantry to deter cavalry in the wars of the Middle Ages. The turnpike consisted of a row of pikes or bars, each sharpened at one end and attached to horizontal members, secured at one end to an upright pole or axle, which could be rotated to open or close the gate. The name expressed the resentment of people who had previously used the roads freely suddenly finding them barred.

During the first three decades of the eighteenth century, sections of the main radial roads into London were put under the control of individual turnpike trusts. The pace at which new turnpikes were created picked up in the 1750s as 150 trusts were formed to maintain the cross-routes between the Great Roads radiating from London. At this time, roads leading into provincial towns, particularly in western England, were put under single trusts and key roads in Wales were turnpiked. In South Wales, the roads of complete counties were put under single turnpike trusts by the 1760s. A further 400 were established in the 1770s, with the turnpiking of subsidiary connecting roads, routes over new bridges and new routes in the growing industrial areas in Scotland. This had doubled by 1800, and in 1825 about 1,000 trusts controlled 29,000 miles of road across the country. The trusts were required to erect milestones indicating the distance between the main towns on the road, many of which still survive as do the old toll houses, such as the one at Stanton Drew, in Somerset, or Honiton, in Devon.

The improved road system heralded the Golden Age of Coaching, with fast mail coaches and passenger stagecoaches hammering along the new highways at what were considered unbelievable speeds. The excitement of driving a coach and four fascinated members of the Regency set, who competed with professional coachmen in the skill of handling a team of ‘cattle’ and often bribed professionals to let them take over the ‘ribbons’ on one of the regular coach routes, to the alarm and discomfort of the passengers. Most notable among the amateurs were Sir St Vincent Cotton, who bought the stagecoach The Age with the last of a fortune he had gambled away and ran a passenger service between London and Brighton. There was also Sir John Lade, who caused a scandal by marrying the wife of the highwayman ‘Sixteen String Jack’ Rann shortly after he had been hanged for robbing the Royal Chaplain; Harry Stevenson, a Cambridge graduate and a genius with coach horses; Lord Worcester; Lord Sefton; Colonel Berkeley; and Lord Barrymore, known as ‘Hellgate’ for his outrageous behaviour. As the turnpike roads spread across the country, coaching inns became a feature of many villages as the existing ale houses were upgraded to accommodate passengers whilst the coach horses were changed. These survive as the ever-popular village pub.

A new generation of agricultural improvers emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century with ideas to meet the challenge of a population that had risen to around nine million, the rapid development of industrial towns, expanding colonisation and an army and navy on active service of about 160,000.

THE BIRTH OF NEW BREEDS

With improved feeding, livestock were growing better carcase qualities, but Robert Bakewell from Derbyshire experimented with selective breeding to standardise the best characteristic, within a breed. He started with the old Lincolnshire breed of sheep that he turned into the New Leicester. These sheep were big and delicately boned and had good-quality fleece and fatty forequarters, in keeping with the popular taste for fatty shoulder mutton. He also began the practice of hiring out his prize rams to farmers to improve their own stock.

One of the many advantages of the new communication system of roads and canals was the opportunity for farmers to exchange quality livestock amongst each other. These sheep were exported widely, including to Australia and North America, and have contributed to numerous modern breeds, despite that fact that they fell quickly out of favour as market preferences in meat and textiles changed. Bloodlines of these original New Leicesters survive today as the English Leicester, or Leicester Longwool, which is primarily kept for wool production.

Robert Bakewell was also the first to breed cows primarily for beef. Previously, cattle were first and foremost kept for pulling ploughs as oxen. Bakewell had noticed that the Longhorn breed appeared to be the most efficient meat producers; they ate less and put on more weight than any other breed. As with the sheep, he began breeding in-and-in to enhance their characteristics and enable him to ‘grow’ a better carcass more efficiently. By the time he had finished, his cattle were fat, meaty and had doubled in carcass weight, and as more and more farmers followed his lead, farm animals increased dramatically in size and quality.

John Ellman then produced the stocky Sussex sheep, noted for its carcass and meat quality, which were soon being bought by improvers across Britain and exported to Russia.

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 initial process, but even so, it was enormously time consuming. Circular stone-walled enclosures called stells were built on, or near, each heft and the sheep shut in them at night. By day, a boy or an old man would stay on each heft, keeping the flocks separate.

Gradually, over several years, the sheep on each heft became acclimatised to their own ground. To maintain this territorial knowledge, every year ewes that had reached an age where they could no longer productively survive the harsh conditions were sold off the farm and a proportionate number of ewe lambs from each heft retained, thus the grazing territories became inherited knowledge, passed from mother to daughter. The sheep on the hefts at my farm are the lineal descendants of those established 250 years ago and it is not unusual to see family groups of great-grandmother, grandmother, daughter and her lamb, all grazing together in the same group. Eventually the sheep ceased to be shut in at night and reverted to the instinctive grazing pattern of wild animals. In the afternoon they make their way to the safety of high ground and rest there until dawn. As the sun comes up, they slowly graze downhill to the sweet grass in the valley bottoms and, depending on the hours of daylight, they then start making their way back to high ground.

This natural ‘rake’ performed by hill sheep every day of their lives is what makes the husbandry of hill farming possible. The one glaring indication that a hill sheep is in distress is if it does not follow flocking behaviour. A hill shepherd’s day starts with his circuit of high ground; if a sheep is hanging back whilst the others are all grazing downhill, there is something amiss. In the afternoon, the shepherd goes round his low ground and the same principle applies. It is particularly pertinent at lambing time; ideally, as with all wild animals, a hill ewe prefers to give birth a few hours before dawn as this gives them time to recover from the birthing process, clean the offspring and see that it has suckled and is able to follow her before any danger that daylight might bring. A lesser proportion give birth during the day, after they have reached the good grazing of the lower ground and whilst there is still time for the lamb to be up and suckled before the trek back. Therefore a shepherd looks for likely problems on high ground in the early morning and on low ground at night.

The other essential piece of knowledge which is passed from generation to generation by the hefting is that if a hill farm changes hands the sheep always stay on the farm and an extra price over their market value is added for ‘hefting and acclimitisation’. Were they to go, it would be virtually impossible, in this day and age, to replicate the hefting and a new flock would simply surge round in a bunch, eating out the most palatable herbage until all the goodness had gone.

Hill farming would not be possible without the shepherd’s collie: ‘A single shepherd and his dog will accomplish more in gathering a stock of sheep from a highland farm than twenty shepherds could without dogs, and it is a fact that without this docile animal the pastoral life would be blank. Without the shepherd’s dog, the whole of the mountainous land in Scotland would not be worth sixpence. It would require more hands to manage a stock of sheep and drive them to market than the profits of a whole stock would be capable of maintaining? This observation by James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is as true today as it was in 1800. A trained sheepdog in action is a wonderful sight and I consider myself privileged to have spent my farming life working with a succession of fantastic examples. Sheepdog trialling started 1873 at Bala in south Wales and there are over 400 sheepdog trials held every year in Britain, ranging from Nursery, Open, National Championship (a three-day trial held in Ireland), to the International Supreme Championship, which rotates between England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, with each country sending a team of fifteen dogs.

REGENERATING THE HEATHER-CLAD HILLS

Burning heather to create fresh, palatable regrowth is as old as farming, but until the agricultural revolution it was only carried out in a very small way. The glorious carpet of purple bloom that we know today as an enchanting feature of parts of the north of England and much of Scotland was reclaimed from untamed heath by graziers as they established their flocks. By using a system of rotational burning across a hill farm and a carefully controlled stocking rate, flock-masters discovered that in place of scrub and old rank heather an even spread of palatable mixed ages could be maintained.

There was an ever-growing interest in shooting sports during the nineteenth century and an increasing demand for shooting tenancies. Landlords began to notice that moors managed by graziers carried many more coveys of grouse than those that weren’t. Grouse feed on the green shoots of juvenile heather plants, and burning to give fresh food for sheep simultaneously provided grouse with the necessary food source for population expansion. This led to the successful partnership between sheep and grouse which has existed ever since, with heather burning playing a vital role in moorland management for both whilst providing a habitat for an increased number of summering bird species. If heather is not burnt, it becomes old and stemmy and lacks nutritional value for sheep or grouse and both species – and indeed all other moorland wildlife – naturally decline, including predators.

IF HEATHER IS NOT BURNT, IT BECOMES OLD AND STEMMY AND LACKS NUTRITIONAL VALUE FOR SHEEP OR GROUSE AND BOTH SPECIES – AND INDEED ALL OTHER MOORLAND WILDLIFE – NATURALLY DECLINE, INCLUDING PREDATORS.

A properly managed heather moor has a mosaic pattern of different ages and lengths of heather, about 30 metres wide and up to 100 metres long, burnt rotationally every year to provide continual regrowth. This ensures that sheep graze evenly across their hefts and provides grouse and other moorland ground-nesting birds with the depth of cover to nest in safety from the increasing number of aerial predators and space for their chicks to learn to fly. Heather burning is strictly governed by legislation; below 1,500 feet it is only permissible between 1 October and 15 April and there is a fifteen-day extension for ground above that altitude. In both cases, if the weather is particularly wet a further extension may be granted. In theory, there are six months in which to burn heather; in practice, most heather is burnt in a short, hectic period from mid-March, when the heather is dry and the underlying peat wet. The most important factor is to stop burning before ground-nesting birds start to lay their eggs.

Heather burning has become very technical during my lifetime. It used to be done by gangs of men armed with shovels to control the fires, now there are tractor-mounted flails to cut out the shape of the area to be burnt, leaving damp mulch behind which helps control the flames and high-pressure fogging units mounted on Argocats to deal with emergencies. Today, hill farming incomes bear no resemblance to the value of the sporting increment, and although sheep and grouse continue to coexist necessarily, the preservation of moorland conservation is almost entirely funded by shooting. Without this the landscape would revert to an unsightly jungle of rank, heather, thistles and scrub.

FARMING MODERN BRITAIN

By 1850 Britain had become arguably the most powerful country in the world. The population had risen to 21 million, 50 per cent of whom were urban-based and employed, one way or another, in the booming manufacturing industries. The world map turned ever pinker as colonisation continued, requiring an army of about 400,000. The railways had out-competed all other means of transport and the rail network spread rapidly across the country; technological advances in agricultural machinery made improvements to all existing reaping and threshing machines, new ploughs and drills.

There was another surge in more efficient fertilisation when chemists discovered that guano contains high concentrations of nitrates and phosphates. In essence, guano is the sedimentary conglomerate of dung, carcasses, feathers, eggshells and sand accumulating in areas where seabirds congregate in confined spaces on small off-shore islands or rocky outcrops, which by virtue of their inaccessibility offer shelter from natural predators. Climatic and environmental conditions favouring this scenario occur on the west coasts of both South America and Southern Africa. The discovery of rich guano deposits on the islands and coast of Chile, and Ichaboe Island, off what is now Namibia, started a series of mad rushes to acquire the precious excrement. As guano resources became exhausted towards the end of the century, they were replaced by the latest innovation in extracting goodness from the soil, chemically manufactured sulphate of ammonia and superphosphate. Agricultural productivity also rose on the back of the increase in the use of roots crops and, with an urban demand for fruit, apples became an alternative crop. In 1877, there were 9,000 hectares of eating and cider apples in Devon, Herefordshire and Somerset, 4,000 in Worcestershire, 3,500 in Gloucestershire and 2,500 in Kent.

WOOL, WHICH FOR CENTURIES HAD BEEN THE FOUNDATION OF THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY, WAS DECLINING IN IMPORTANCE TO COTTON. HOWEVER, AS THE MARKET FOR MEAT CONTINUED TO GROW, MANY FARMERS RESPONDED BY ADAPTING THEIR BREEDING POLICY FROM WOOL TO MEAT PRODUCTION.

Wool, which for centuries had been the foundation of the textile industry, was declining in importance to cotton. However, as the market for meat continued to grow, many farmers responded by adapting their breeding policy from wool to meat production. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain’s large urban workforce provided a huge stimulus for a world economy dominated by international trade, commercialism and industrialisation. A large proportion of trade was based on import and subsequent export, supported by service industries such as banking which improved the balance of payments with invisibles. Free trade also led to an economic boom, and a significant part of the escalating population were enjoying leisure time and rising prosperity. Wage rates had increased, the birth rate fell and diets improved. Agriculture remained fundamental in the supply of foodstuffs but its influence was waning in the economy as a whole and land, once identified with power, became just another asset. In 1850, agriculture accounted for 20 per cent of national income, but by 1900 this had fallen to just 6 per cent.

In 1945, despite the agricultural changes of the previous 200 years, Britain still had a mellow, rustic air. Plump hedgerows full of wildflowers enclosed fields where cart horses still plodded ahead of the plough. Winding lanes wandered among villages and family farms, with their woodland clumps, orchards, livestock and grain systems, where a pig was fattened every year for bacon, chicken scratched for spilt grain in the stack yard and ducks paddled on the pond. As ever, a dark cloud hung over this Utopian scene, and change as dramatic as any that had gone before was on its way. At the end of the war, Britain needed to maximise food production and agriculture was supported by grant funding and price support, greatly empowering a new modern era of agriculture with new technology, specialisation and improved breeding techniques. This was all very well in response to the immediate post-war food shortage, but government pressure to increase food production during the Cold War scare led to a period of intensification that dramatically altered the rural landscape.