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