Sections 10-12: Timber, Planting; Manures, Waste Lands; Cattle, Wool, Winter Food

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SECTION X.

Timber—Planting.

THROUGH every part of Ireland, in which I have been, one hundred contiguous acres are not to be found without evident signs, that they were once wood, or at least very well wooded. Trees, and the roots of trees of the largest size, are dug up in all the bogs; and in the cultivated countries, the stumps of trees destroyed shew that the destruction has not been of any antient date. A vast number of the Irish names for hills, mountains, vallies and plains, have forests, woods, groves, or trees, for the signification; Lord Kingsborough has an hundred thousand acres about Mitchelstown, in which you must take a breathing gallop to find a stick large enough to beat a dog, yet is there not an enclosure without the remnants of trees, many of them large; nor is it a peculiarity to that estate: in a word, the greatest part of the kingdom exhibits a naked, bleak, dreary view for want of wood, which has-been destroyed for a century past, with the most thoughtless prodigality, and still continues to be cut and wasted, as if it was not worth the preservation. The Baltic fir supplies all the uses of the kingdom, even those for which nothing is proper but oak; and the distance of all the ports of Ireland from that sea, makes the supply much dearer than it is in England.

IN conversation with gentlemen, I found they very generally laid the destruction of timber to the common people; who, they say, have an aversion to a tree; at the earliest age they steal it for a walking-stick; afterwards for a spade handle; later for a car shaft; and later still for a cabbin rafter; that the poor do steal it IS certain, but I am clear the gentlemen of the country may thank themselves. Is it the consumption of sticks and handles that has destroyed millions of acres? Absurdity! The profligate, prodigal, worthless landowner, cuts down his acres, and leaves them unfenced against cattle, and then he has the impudence to charge the scarcity of trees to the walking-sticks of the poor, and goes into the house of commons and votes for an act, which lays a penalty of forty shillings on any poor man having a twig in his possession, which he cannot account for. This act, and twenty more in the same spirit, stands at present a monument of their self-condemnation and oppression. They have made wood so scarce, that the wretched cottars cannot procure enough for their necessary consumption, and then they pass penal laws on their stealing, or even possessing, what it is impossible for them to buy. If by another act you would hang up all the landlords who cut woods without fencing, and destroy trees without planting, you would lay your axe to the root of the evil, and rid the kingdom of some of the greatest pests in it; but in the name of humanity and common sense, let the poor alone, for whose stealing in this, as in most other cases, nobody ought to be answerable but yourselves. I was an eye-witness in various parts of the kingdom, of woods cut down and not copsed. The honestest poor upon earth, if in the same situation as the Irish, would be stealers of wood, for they must either steal or go without what is an absolute necessary of life. Instead of being the destroyers of trees, I am confident they may be made preservers of them; recollect Sir William Osborne's mountaineers, to whom he gave a few Lombardy poplars, they cherished them with as much care as his own gardener could have done. At Mitchelstown, I had opportunities of making observations which convinced me of the same thing; I saw in every respect, indeed all over Ireland, the greatest readiness to do whatever would recommend them to their landlord's favour. I had three plans relative to wood, which I have reason to believe would answer in any part of the kingdom: First, To give premiums to the cottars who planted and preserved trees , and not to let it depend on the premium alone, but to keep a list of those who appeared as candidates, and upon every other occasion to let them be objects of favour. Second , To force all the tenantry to plant under the following clause in their leases:

And also, that the said A. B. his heirs and assigns, shall and will, every year, during the continuance of this demise, well and truly plant, and thoroughly secure until the end of the said term, from all injury or damage by cattle, or otherwise, one timber tree for every     acres that are contained in the herein demised premises, provided that such trees shall be supplied gratis, on demand, by the said C. D. his heirs and assigns; and in case any trees shall die or fail, that in such case the said A. B. shall and will plant in the year next after such death or failure, an equal number of timber trees in the said demised premises, in the place or stead of such tree or trees so dying or failing as aforesaid; and in case, at the expiration of the said demise, the proper number of trees, of a due age, according to the meaning and intent of these premises, be not left growing and standing upon the said demised premises, or some part thereof, that then the said A. B. his heirs or assigns, shall forfeit and pay unto the said C. D. his heirs and assigns, the sum of five shillings for every tree so deficient by death, failure, injury, or negligence.

THE proportion of acres per tree to be according to circumstances. It should always be remembered, that the clauses of a lease rarely execute themselves; it is the landlord's, or his agent's attention that must make them efficient. A tenantry every where is very much dependant, unless leases for lives are given, but I suppose them for twenty-one years. In Ireland their poverty makes this dependance still greater. They ask time for the payment of their rent; they run in arrears; they are threatened or driven; if they pay well, still they have some favour to ask, or expect; in a word, they are in such a situation, that attention would secure the most entire compliance with such a clause. If once, or twice, upon an estate, a man was drove for his rent, who neglected the trees, while another in the same circumstances had time given him because he preserved them, the effect would presently be seen. Third , To have a magazine of sticks, spade handles, pieces for cars, cabbins, &c. laid in at the cheapest rate, and kept for selling at prime cost to whoever would buy them. These would want to be purchased but for a few years, as small plantations of the timber wiilow would in four years furnish an ample supply.

THAT these three circumstances united, would presently plant a country I am convinced; I saw a willingness among Lord Kingsborough's little tenants to do it, some even who made a beginning the very first year; and hundreds assured me of their most assiduous compliance. Such a plan most certainly should not preclude large annual plantations on the land which a gentleman keeps in hand; but the beauty of the country depends on trees, scattered over the whole face of it. What a figure would Ireland make on a comparison with its present state, if one tree now stood by each cabbin! but it is the spirit of the Irish nation to attempt every thing by laws, and then leave those laws to execute themselves, which indeed with many of them is not at all amiss. It is by no means clear, whether the act which gives to the tenant a property in the trees he plants, to be ascertained by a jury at the end of the lease, and paid by the landlord, has any great tendency to encrease the quantity of wood. It has unfortunately raised an undecided question of law, whether the act extends to trees, which were originally furnished from the landlord's nursery, or planted in consequence of a clause in a lease. If it should so interfere with such plantations, it would be highly mischievous: also, for a man to be forced either to buy or to sell his property, at the price fixed by a jury, is a harsh circumstance. To this cause it is probably owing, that the plantations made in consequence of that act, are perfectly insignificant.

I have made many very minute calculations of the expence, growth, and value of plantations in Ireland, and am convinced from them that there is no application of the best land in that kingdom will equal the profit of planting the worst in it. A regard for the interest of posterity call for the oak and other trees which require more than an age to come to maturity, but with other views the quick growing ones are for profit much superior; these come to perfection so speedily that three fourths of the landlords of the kingdom might expect to cut where they planted, and reap those great profits, which most certainly attend it. There are timber willows (tallies as they are called in Ireland) which rise with incredible rapidity. 1 have measured them at Mr. Bolton's, near Waterford, twenty-one feet high in the third year from the planting, and as strait as a larch. With this willow, woods would arise as it were by enchantment, and all sorts of farm offices and cabbins might be built of it in seven years from planting. Is it not inexcusable to complain of a want of wood when it is to be had with so much ease? Larch and beech thrive wonderfully wherever I have seen them planted; the Lombardy poplar makes the same luxuriant shoots for which it is famous in England; and though a soft wood, yet it is applicable to such a multiplicity of purposes, and so easily propagated that it deserves the greatest attention.

As to oak they are always planted in Ireland from a nursery, I have seen very handsome trees as old as fifteen years, some perhaps older, but even at that age they run incomparably more into head than plants in England which have never been transplanted. It is a great misfortune that a century at least is necessary to prove the mischief of the practice: We know by most ample experience that the noble oaks in England applicable to the use of the large ships of war, were all sown where they remained. That tree pushes its tap root so powerfully that I have the greatest reason to believe the future growth suffers essentially from its being injured, and I defy the most skilful nurseryman to take them up upon a large scale without breaking, if it is broke in the part where it is an almost imperceptible thread, it is just the same as cutting it off: in a larger part, the steady perpendicular power is lost, and the surface roots must feed the plant, these may do for a certain growth, and to a certain period, but the tree will never become the sovereign of the forest, or the waves. I know several plantations as sown oak in England from twelve to thirty, and some forty years growth, which are truly beautiful, and infinitely beyond any thing I have seen in Ireland.

THE woods yet remaining in that kingdom are what in_England would be called copses. They are cut down at various growths, some being permitted to stand forty years. Attentive landlords fence when they cut to preserve the future shoots, others do not. But this is by no means the system with a view to which 1 recommend planting; timber of any kind cut as such will pay double and treble what the shoots from any stubs in the world will do. They may come to a tolerable size, and yield a large value; but the profit is not to be compared with the other. To explain this, permit me one or two remarks.

IF willow, poplars, ash, &c. are planted for timber to be cut at whatever age, ten, twenty or thirty years; when cut the stools will throw out many shoots, but let it not be imagined that these shoots will ever again become timber; they will never be any thing but copse wood, and attended in future with no more than the copse profit, which is not half that of timber, in such a case the land should be new planted, and the old stools either grubbed up for fuel, or else the growth from them cut very often for faggots till the new timber gets up enough to drip on and destroy it. The common practice in Ireland is cutting young trees down when they do not shoot well, this is converting timber to copse wood; attention to cutting off all the shoots but one will train up a stem, but I question whether it will ever make a capital tree: if the other shoots are not annually cut it will never be any tree at all; and yet it is certainly a fact that the new shoot is much finer than the old one, which perhaps would have come to nothing; but better remove it entirely than depend on new shoots for making timber. The gentlemen in that kingdom are much too apt to think they have got timber, when in fact they have nothing but fine large copse wood. A strong proof of this is the great double ditches made thirty or forty years ago, and planted with double rows of trees, generally ash, these for two reasons are usually (for the age) not half so good as trees of the same growth in England; one is, many of them were cut when young, and arose from stools; the other, their growing out of a high dry bank, full of the roots of four rows of white thorn or apple quick, besides those of the trees themselves. It is a fact that I never saw a single capital tree growing on these banks: all hedge trees are difficult to preserve, and therefore must have been cut when young. Ash in England growing from a level are generally worth in forty years, from forty shillings to three pounds. And I know many trees from fifty to sixty years growth that would sell readily at from four to eight pounds, yet the price in Ireland is higher. Another practice which is common in that kingdom is pruning timber trees, and even oaks. I was petrified at seeing oaks of ten and fifteen feet high with all the side shoots cut off. There are treatises upon planting which recommend this practice as well as cutting down young trees to make the better timber. There are no follies which are not countenanced, and even prescribed in some book or other, but unhappy is it for a kingdom when they are listened to. Burn your books, and attend to nature; come to England and view our oak, our ash, and our beech all self sown, and never cursed with the exertions of art. Shew me such trees from the hands of nurserymen and pruners before you waste your breath with shallow reasoning to prove that the most common of the operations of nature must be assisted by the axe or pruning hook.¹

ONE reason why both fences and trees in Ireland which have once been made are now neglected and in ruin, is owing to the first planting being all that is thought of; the hedges are suffered to grow for thirty or forty years without cutting; the consequence of which is their being ragged, and open at bottom, and full of gaps whole perches long. But all fences should be cut periodically, for the same reason that trees ought never to be touched, their pushing out many shoots, for everyone that is taken off; this should be repeated every fifteen years; a proper portion of the thorns should be planted down to form an impenetrable live hedge, and the rest cut off, and made into faggots. But in the Irish way the fences yield no fuel at all. To permit a hedge to grow too long without cutting, not only ruins it for a fence, but spoilt the trees that are planted with it.

LASTLY, let me observe, that the amazing neglect in not planting osier grounds for making baskets and small hoops, is unpardonable throughout the kingdom, they no where thrive better; a small one I planted in the county of Corke grew six feet the first year: at that port there is a considerable importation of them from Portugal.

SECTION XI.

Manures—Waste Lands.

'T'HE manure commonly used in Ireland is lime; inexhaustible quarries of the finest lime-stone are found in most parts of the island, with either turf, or culm at a moderate price to burn it. To do the gentlemen of that country justice, they understand this branch of husbandry very well, and practice it with uncommon spirit. Their kilns are the best I have any where seen, and great numbers are kept burning the whole year through, without a thought of stopping on account of the winter. Their draw kilns burn up to forty barrels a day; and what they call French kilns, which burn the stone without breaking, have been made even to five thousand barrels in a kiln. Mr. Leslie laying ten thousand barrels on his land in one year, and Mr. Aldworth as much, are instances which I never heard equalled. Upon an average of the tour 100 barrels are laid upon an acre at the medium price of nine pence.

THAT quantity is upon the whole considerable. The price shews the plenty of this manure in Ireland. To find any place (which is the case) where it can be burnt for three- pence and four-pence is truly wonderful, but can only be from the union of turf and lime-stone.

I no where heard of any land that had been over limed, or on which the repetition of it had proved so disadvantageous as it has sometimes been found in England.²

LIME-STONE gravel is a manure peculiar to Ireland, and is most excellent. It is a blue gravel, mixed with stores as large as a man's fist, and sometimes with a clay loam; but the whole mass has a very strong effervescence with acid. On uncultivated lands it has the same wonderful effect as lime, and on clay arable, a much greater; but it is beneficial to all soils. In the isle of Anglesea, a country which much resembles Ireland, there is a gravel like it, which has also some effervescence; but I never met with it in any other part of England.

MARLE in Ireland is not so common as these manures. That which is oftenest found is white, and remarkably light; it lies generally under bogs. Shell marle is dredged up in the Shannon, and in the harbour of Waterford,

IN the catalogue of manures, I wish I could add the composts formed in well littered farm yards, but there is not any part of husbandry in the kingdom more neglected than this; indeed I have scarcely any where seen in the occupation of farmers the least vestige of such a convenience as a yard surrounded with offices for the winter shelter, and feeding of cattle. All sorts of animals range about the field in winter, by which means the quantity of dung raised is contemptible. To dwell upon a point of such acknowledged importance is needless. Time it is to be hoped will introduce a better system,

WASTE LANDS.

ALTHOUGH the proportion of waste territory is not, I apprehend, so great in Ireland as it is in England, certainly owing to the rights of commonage in the latter country which fortunately have no existence in Ireland; yet are the tracts of desart mountains and bogs very considerable. Upon these lands is to be practiced the most profitable husbandry in the king's dominions; for so I am persuaded the improvement of mountain land to be. By that expression is not to be understood only very high lands, all wastes in Ireland that are not bog they call mountain ; so that you hear of land under that denomination where even a hillock is not to be seen. The largest tracts, however, are adjoining to real mountains, especially where they slope off to a large extent gradually to the south. Of this sort, Lord Kingsborough has a very extensive and most unprofitable range. In examining it, with many other mountains, and in about five months experience of the beginning only of an improvement under my direction there, I had an opportunity of ascertaining a few points which made me better acquainted with the practicability of those undertakings, than if I had only passed as a traveller through the kingdom. By stating a few of the circumstances of this attempt, others who have mountains under similar circumstances may judge of the propriety of improving. The land has a very gentle declivity from the Galty mountains towards the south, and to a new road Lord Kingsborough made leading from Mitchelstown towards Cahir, which road he very wisely judged was the first step to the melioration of the waste parts of his estate, as well as a great public benefit. To the south side ot this road lime-stone is found, and on the north side, the improvement was begun in a spot that included some tolerable good land, some exceeding rough and stoney, and a wet bottom where there was a bog two, three, and four feet deep; the land yielded no other profit than being a commonage to the adjoining farm, in which way it might pay the rent possibly of a shilling an acre: twenty thousand acres by estimation joined it in the same situation which did not yield the fourth of that rent. In June I built a lime-kiln which burnt twenty barrels a day; and cut, led, and stacked turf enough to keep it burning a whole twelvemonth; sketched the fences of four inclosures, making thirty-four acres, and finished the first work of them, leaving the rest, and planting till winter.³ I cleared two inclosures of stones; pared and burnt them; burnt eight hundred barrels of lime, limed one inclosure, and sowed one-third with wheat, a third with rye, and the other with bere, as an experiment; the other field with turnips, which from the continual drought, failed. Two cabbins were built; and the whole expence in five months, including the price of all ploughing and carriage, (the latter from the miserable cars and garrens at a most extravagant rate) buying timber, steward's wages, &c. amounted to one hundred and fifty pounds. The moment the neighbours understood the works were at an end, some of them offered me ten shillings an acre for the land to take it as it was, which is just eleven per cent. for the money, but I could have got more. The following were the only data gained: lime burnt for five-pence a barrel. Paring with the graffan in stoney land, 30s. to 40s. an acre, and done by the plough at eight shillings much better; burning and spreading the ashes depend on weather, one piece cost above twenty shillings an acre, the other not five, but on an average I should calculate it at ten shillings. The whole operation may be very well done with the plough at twenty shillings. Clearing from stones and carting away, various; I found a very stoney piece could be cleared at twelve shillings an acre. A single ditch seven feet broad, and from three to five deep, the bank nine feet high from the bottom of the ditch, cost one shilling and six-pence; but this expence would have lessened when they were more accustomed to it: consequently a double fence, with a space between left for planting, three shillings.

My design was to purchase a flock of mountain sheep in the following spring, and keep them through the summer in the mountains, but folding them every night in the improvement, in which work I could have instructed the people, and when once they had seen the benefit, I do not think the practice would ever have been lost. To have provided plenty of turnips for their winter support, and improved the breed by giving them some better tups, but to have done this gradually in proportion as their food improved. Turnips to be for some years the only crop, except small pieces by way of trial. To have laid down the land to grass after a proper course of turnips in the manner and with the seeds I practised in Hartfordshire, which would have shewn what that operation is. There is not a complete meadow in the whole country. To have proportioned the sheep to the turnips at the rate of from twenty to thirty an acre, according to the goodness of the crop. There is a power in such waste tracts of keeping any number in summer; the common people keep them all the year on the mountains. The annual product of. the improved land is in this system very easily ascertained. Suppose only twenty⁴ sheep per acre, and no more than fifteen lambs from them, worth two shillings and six-pence each, it is thirty-seven shillings and six-pence, and the twenty fleeces at one shilling make fifty-seven shillings and six-pence : about three pound therefore may be reckoned the lowest value of an acre of turnips at first; but as successive crops on the same land improve greatly, they would winter more than twenty, and both lambs and wool be more valuable, so that from a variety of circumstances I have attended to in that country, I am clear the common value of the turnips might he carried to four pounds, and in the course of a few years perhaps to five pounds an acre. And to state the expence of such an improvement completely finished at ten pounds an acre, including every article whatever; three crops of turnips amply repay the whole, and the future produce or rent of the land, neat profit. This would be twenty shillings an acre; twenty- five shillings are commonly paid for much worse land. The real fact of such improvements is a landlord's accepting an estate gratis, or at least paying nothing but trouble for it. Nearly such conclusions must be drawn from Lord Altamont's mountain works, of which an account is given in the minutes. I should remark that the people I employed, though as ignorant as any in the kingdom, and had never seen a turnip hoe, hoed the turnips when I shewed them the manner, very readily, and though not skilfully, well enough to prove their docility would not be wanting; it was the same with the paring mattock and the Norfolk turnip sower. They very readily execute orders, and seem to give their inclination to it.

THERE are several reasons which make these improvements more profitable and easy in Ireland than they are in England. There are no common rights to encounter, which are the curse of our moors. Buildings, which in England form one of the heaviest articles, are but a trifling expence; make the land good, and you will let it readily without any at all; or at least with an allowance of a roof towards a cabbin; and lastly, the proportionate value of improved land, compared with that of unimproved, is much higher than it is with us, owing to the want of capital rendering all improvements so rare, and to the common people so difficult. Three hundred pounds a year steadily employed in such a work, would in a few years create an estate sufficient for the greatest undertakings: but success depends on a regular unbroken exertion, a point I found very few persons in Ireland thoroughly understood, owing to their not being accustomed to large flocks of sheep regularly depending on turnips. At the same time that this work was carrying on, his Lordship, by my advice, encouraged the peasantry themselves to take in small parts of these mountains. The adjoining farms being out of lease, he had a power of doing what he pleased; I marked a road, and assigned portions of the waste on each side to such as were willing to form the forces in the manner prescribed, to cultivate and inhabit the land, allowing each a guinea towards his cabbin, and promising the best land rent free for three years, and the worst for five; the eagerness with which the poor people came into this scheme, convinced me that they wanted nothing but a little encouragement to enter with all their might and spirit into the great work of improvement. They trusted to my assurance enough to go to work upon the ditches, and actually made a considerable progress. In all undertakings of this sort in Ireland it is the poor cottars, and the very little farmers, who are the best tools to employ, and the best tenants to let the land to; but this circumstance raises many enemies to the work; the better sort who have been used to tread upon and oppress are ill pleased to see any importance or independancy given to them: and the whole race of jobbing gentlemen, whose conversation for ever takes the turn of ridiculing the poverty of the cottar tenants, will always be ready with an equal cargo of falshood and ignorance, to decry and depreciate any undertaking which is not to conduce to their own benefit: if a landlord does not steadily resolve to laugh at all this trash, he had better never think of improvements.

TRIFLING as these have been on the Irish mountains, yet are the bogs still more neglected. The minutes of the journey shew that a few gentlemen have executed very meritorious works even in these, but as they, unfortunately for the public, do not live upon any of the very extensive bogs, the inhabitants near the latter deny the application of their remarks. Bogs are of two sorts, black and red. The black bog is generally very good, it is solid almost to the surface, yields many ashes in burning, and generally admitted to be improveable, though at a heavy expence. The red sort has usually a reddish substance, five or six feet deep from the surface, which holds water like a spunge, yields no ashes in burning, and is supposed to be utterly irreclaimable.

IN the variety of theories which have been started to account for the formation of bogs, difficulties occur which are not easily solved: yet are there many circumstances which assist in tracing the cause. Various sorts of trees, some of them of a great size, are very generally found in them, and usually at the bottom, oak, fir, and yew the most common; the roots of these trees are fast in the earth; some of the trees seem broken off, others appear to be cut, but more with the marks of fire on them. Under some bogs of a considerable depth there are yet to be seen the furrows of land once ploughed. The black bog is a solid weighty mass, which cuts almost like butter, and upon examination appears to resemble rotten wood. Under the red bogs there is always a stratum, if not equally solid with the black bog, nearly so, and makes as good fuel. There is upon the black as well as the red ones a surface of that spungy vegetable mass which is cleared away to get at the bog for fuel, but it is shallow on these. Sound trees are found equally in both sorts. Both differ extremely from the bogs I have seen in England in the inequality of the surface; the Irish ones are rarely level, but rise into hills. I have seen one in Donnegal which is a perfect scenery of hill and dale. The spontaneous growth most common is heath; with some bog myrtle, rushes, and a little sedgy grass. As far as I can judge by roads, laying gravel of any sort, clay, earth, &c. improves the bog, and brings good grass. The depth of them is various, thev have been fathomed to that of fifty feet, and some are said to be still deeper.

FROM these circumstances it appears, that a forest cut, burnt, or broken down, is probably the origin of a bog. In all countries where wood is so common as to be a weed, it is destroyed by burning; it is so around the Baltick, and in America at present. The native Irish might cut and burn their woods enough for the tree to fall, and in the interim between such an operation and successive culture, wars and other intestine divisions might prevent it in those spots, which so neglected afterwards became bogs. Trees lying very thick on the ground would become an impediment to all streams and currents, and gathering in their branches, whatever rubbish such waters brought with them, form a mass of a substance which time might putrefy, and give that acid quality to, which would preserve some of the trunks though not the branches of the trees. The circumstance of red bogs being black and solid at the bottom, would seem to indicate that a black bog has received less accession from the growth and putrefaction of vegetables after the formation than the red ones, which from some circumstances of soil or water might yield a more luxuriant surface vegetation, till it produced that mass of spunge which is now found on the surface. That this supposition is quite satisfactory I cannot assert, but the effect appears to be at least possible, and accounts for the distinction between the two kinds. That they receive their form and increase from a constant vegetation appears from their rising into hills, if they did not vegetate the quantity of water they contain would keep them on a level. The places where the traces of ploughing are found, I should suppose were once fields adjoining to the woods, and when the bog rose to a certain height it flowed gradually over the surrounding land.

BUT the means of improving them is the most important consideration at present. Various methods have been prescribed, and some small improvements have been effected by a few gentlemen, but at so large an expence that it is a question how far their operations answered. Here, therefore, one must call in theory to our aid from a deficiency of practice. Fortunately for a bog improver, drains are cut at so small an expence, in them, that that necessary work is done at a very moderate cost. But in spungy ones it must be repeated annually, according to the substance of the bog, and no other work attended to but linking the drains lower and lower, by no means till you come to the bottom, (the necessity of which is an error) but till the spaces between them will bear an ox in boots. Then the surface should be levelled and burnt, and I would advise nothing to be done for a year or two but rollers as heavy as might be, kept repeatedly going over it, in order to press and consolidate the surface. Before any thing else was attempted, I would see the effect of this; probably the draining and rolling would bring up a fresh surface of vegetables not seen before; in that case I should have very few doubts of finishing the work with the feeding, treading, and fold of sheep, which would encourage the white clover and grasses to vegetate strongly; fortunately for any operation with sheep they can be kept safely, as they never rot in a drained bog. A very ingenious friend of mine thinks the whole might be done with sheep with little or no draining, but from viewing the bogs I am clear that is impossible. During the time of rolling and sheep feeding, the drains I would have kept clean and open, the labour of which would regularly be less and less. When the surface was so hard as to bear cars, marle, clay, gravel, or earth, might be carried on according to distance, which with the sheep feeding would convert it into good meadow. But as carting in a large improvement would probably be too expensive; I should think it worth while to try the experiment whether it would not be practicable to sink a shaft through the bog into the gravel or earth beneath it, boarding or walling, and plaistering with terrass or cement, in order to be able to draw up the under stratum, as all the chalk in Hartfordshire is raised, that is, wound up in buckets; chalk is so raised and wheeled on to the land for the price of eight-pence the load of twenty bushels, and is found a cheap improvement at that price, yet the chalk drawers, as they call themselves, earn two shillings and two and six-pence each day. Whatever the means used, certain it is that no meadows are equal to those gained by improving a bog; they are of a value which scarcely any other lands rise to: in Ireland I should suppose it would not fall short of forty shillings an acre, and rise in many cases to three pounds.

SECTION XII.

Cattle—Wool—Winter Food.

THE cattle in Ireland are much better than the tillage; in the management of the arable ground the Irish are five centuries behind the best cultivated of the English counties, but the moisture of the climate, and the richness of the soil, have reared, assisted with importations from England, a breed of cattle and sheep, though not equal to ours, yet not so many degrees below them as might be expected from other circumstances. The price and profit of fattening bullocks and cows are,

	£.	s.	d.
Price of a bullock	6	0	0
Profit on fattening ditto	3	7	6
Price of a cow	3	16	0
Profit on fattening ditto	1	16	6

THE system pursued in fatting these beasts is explained fully in the minutes of the journey. I think the profit remarkably small. The exportation of beef, and its prices, will be given under the article Trade , as it forms a principal branch of the commerce of Ireland.

Places.		Fleece.			Profit.
		lb.	qrs.		s.	d.
Averages of the Tour through    the North of England		5			10	0
Ditto East of England		5	2		11	8
Average of England		5	1		10	10
Average of Ireland		5			11	0
Average fleece of wool		— —			5 lb.
Year's profit on a sheep		— —			11 s.

FROM hence the remark I often made in Ireland is confirmed, that their sheep are on an average better than those in England; the weight of the fleece is nearly equal to it, and profit rather higher, notwithstanding mutton is dearer in England; this is owing to the price of Wool being so much higher in Ireland than it is with us. The following table will shew the price of it for fourteen years in both kingdoms.

WOOL IN THE FLEECE, Ireland.						WOOL IN THE FLEECE, Lincolnshire.
			Per stone 16 lb.						Tod reduced to stone of 16 lb.
			s.	d.					s.	d.
In the year	1764		11	0		In the year	1764		11	4
	1765		10	0			1765		11	4
	1766		11	0			1766		12	0
	1767		13	0			1767		10	8
	1768		13	6			1768		8	0
	1769		13	6			1769		8	0
	1770		14	0			1770		8	3
	1771		14	0			1771		8	0
	1772*		0	0			1772		8	3
	1773*		0	0			1773		8	4
	1774		14	0			1774		9	0
	1775		16	0			1775		9	6
	1776		16	6			1776		10	0
	1777§		17	6			1777		9	9
	1778		0	0			1778		8	0
	1779		0	0			1779†		6	9
Average,	—		13	8		Average,	—		9	3
47 per cent higher in Ireland than in England.
* UNSETTLED but very high. § Communicated by Mr. Joshua Pine in the woollen trade, Dublin. † Communicated by Mr. James Oaks in the woollen trade, Bury, Suffolk.

FROM hence it appears, that wool has been amazingly higher in Ireland, which accounts for the superiority in the profit of sheep. There are several reasons for the height of price, but the principal are a decrease in the quantity produced, and at the same time an encrease in the consumption. The bounty on the inland carriage of corn, as I shall shew hereafter, has occasioned the ploughing up great tracts of sheep walk; and at the same time the poor people have improved in their cloathing very much: these reasons are fully sufficient to account for that rise in the price of wool, which has brought it to higher than the English rate. There is, however, another very powerful reason, which has had a constant operation, and which is the cheapness of spinning; in Ireland this is two pence halfpenny and three pence, but in England five pence and six pence. Great quantities are therefore spun into yarn in Ireland, and in that state exported to England, for the price of the labour is so low, that a yarn manufacturer can afford to give a much higher price for wool than an English one, and yet sell the yarn itself, after the expence of freight is added, as cheap as English yarn. The quantities of yarn, &c. exported, will be seen hereafter.

MANY gentlemen have made very spirited attempts in improving cattle and sheep in Ireland, so that the mixture of the English breed of cattle has spread all over the kingdom; English sheep are also extending. The minutes of the journey shew that the size of the bullocks is much encreased in the last twenty years,

BUT profitable as sheep are in Ireland, they are not near so as they might be, if turnips were properly attended to; and the reason why oxen and cows yield still less is the same deficiency. The mildness of the climate enables the stock-master to do with but little winter food, and this natural advantage proves an artificial evil, for it prevents those exertions, which the farmers in other countries are obliged to make, in order to support their flocks and herds. Mild as the Irish climate is, the graziers in Tipperary, that is in the south of the kingdom, find nothing more profitable than turnips, though hoeing them is quite unknown; and by means of that root, so very imperfectly managed, supply Dublin with mutton in the spring, to their very great emolument. But the want of winter food is more apparent in black cattle, which upon such very rich land, ought to rise to a size which is scarcely ever met with in Ireland, the usual weight being from four to eight hundred; but from four hundred and a half to five and fix hundred weight, the common size on the rich grounds of Limerick; such land in England is covered with herds that weigh from ten to fifteen hundred weight each; this vast difference is owing to their being reared the two first winters with such a deficiency of food, that their growth is stinted, so that when they come upon the fine bullock land, they are of a size which can never be fattened to the weight of English oxen. The deficiency in turnips, &c. renders hay very valuable in Ireland, which occasions its being given sparingly to cattle; but if they had, while young, as many turnips as they could eat in addition to their present quantity of hay, and were protected in warm yards against the wind and rain, they would rise to a size unknown at present in that kingdom. Upon this and a variety of other accounts, there is scarcely any object in its agriculture of so much importance as the introduction of that plant under the right cultivation.

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¹ Since the first edition of these papers were printed, a carpenter who lives on this estate has shewn me several instances of large oak trees, which he has cut up, expecting to find fine timber, but in the bodies of them found a variety of rotten knots grown over with sound wood, the places where arms were many years ago cut off. Some of the boards for curiosity I bought of him; he is a very sensible attentive man, and has in more than forty years experience made the observation, under such a variety of circumstances, that he often wishes (to use his own language) the men who prime trees—at the devil.—I entirely agree with him.

² See a letter from the late Earl of Holderness to me, inserted in the second edition of the NORTHERN TOUR.

³ Where fences must be done by the day and not the perch, which will generally be the case in the beginning of an improvement in a very wild country, from the labourers being totally ignorant of taking work by measure; all that is possible should be executed in summer, especially in so wet a climate as Ireland; and when no more is paid for a day in july than in december. Some of my banks fell with the autumn rains, owing to two causes; first, the men, instead of knowing how to make a ditch were mountaineers, who scarcely knew the right end of a spade; and secondly, it proved the dryest season that ever was known in Ireland.

⁴ It is to be noted that flock sheep are only baited , and that chiefly in bad weather. The winters in Ireland are much milder than in England.

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