Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
Between Sutton and the Wen there is, in fact, little besides houses,
gardens, grass plats and other matters to accommodate the Jews and
jobbers, and the mistresses and bastards that are put out a-keeping.
But, in a dell, which the turnpike-road crosses about a mile on this
side of Sutton, there are two fields of as stiff land, I think, as I
ever saw in my life. In summer time this land bakes so hard that they
cannot plough it unless it be wet. When you have ploughed it, and the
sun comes again, it bakes again. One of these fields had been thus
ploughed and cross-ploughed in the month of June, and I saw the ground
when it was lying in lumps of the size of portmanteaus, and not very
small ones either. It would have been impossible to reduce this ground
to small particles, except by the means of sledge hammers. The two
fields, to which I alluded just now, are alongside of this ploughed
field, and they are now in wheat. The heavy rain of to-day, aided by the
south-west wind, made the wheat bend pretty nearly to lying down; but
you shall rarely see two finer fields of wheat. It is red wheat; a
coarsish kind, and the straw stout and strong; but the ears are long,
broad and full; and I did not perceive anything approaching towards a
speck in the straw. Such land as this, such very stiff land, seldom
carries a very large crop; but I should think that these fields would
exceed four quarters to an acre; and the wheat is by no means so
backward as it is in some places. There is no corn, that I recollect,
from the spot just spoken of, to almost the street of Kensington. I came
up by Earl's Court, where there is, amongst the market gardens, a field
of wheat. One would suppose that this must be the finest wheat in the
world. By no means. It rained hard, to be sure, and I had not much time
for being particular in my survey; but this field appears to me to have
some blight in it; and as to crop, whether of corn or of straw, it is
nothing to compare to the general run of the wheat in the wealds of
Sussex or of Surrey; what, then, is it, if compared with the wheat on
the South Downs, under Portsdown Hill, on the sea-flats at Havant and at
Tichfield, and along on the banks of the Itchen!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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