Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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