The revoluTion in agriCulTure^99the improvement of their rough pastures or by ploughing; vast numbers
of pollards were felled. George Claridge Druce reported that the buck’s-
horn plantain (Plantago coronopus) could not be found in Ballingdon in the
Oxfordshire Chilterns: ‘the enclosure of Ballingdon Green has extirpated it’.^33
The northern section of the 2,000-acre Northaw Common in Hertfordshire
still had thousands of pollards growing on it when enclosed by an Act of
1803: the work of division was continuing when the Ordnance Survey draft
2" map was made, the surveyor writing the words ‘?clearing for enclosure’
across its area, indicating clearly enough its expected fate.
Enclosure and reclamation also occurred in the uplands, as the frontier
of ‘improvement’ moved onto the moorlands of the north and west. Field
drainage, using drains filled with stones, had been practised on a small
scale for centuries on lower ground, but it was now more widely adopted.^34
The same was true of liming, a necessary remedy for the acute soil acidity
which resulted from the high levels of precipitation on elevated ground.^35
In upland areas, there was nothing like the calcareous marl so useful in
some lowland heathland districts, but limestone was often freely available
which could be burnt in kilns and converted into lime.^36 Its benefits had
long been appreciated: in 1628 the manor of Campsall in Yorkshire was
said to contain ‘great store of lymestone an excellent compost beinge burned
to manure cold grounds’.^37 As inland waterways were improved, however,
and as new canals were constructed, it became easier to move not only the
limestone but also – more importantly – the coal to fire the kilns. Temporary
sod kilns and simple stone-built ‘flare kilns’ were gradually supplemented by
sophisticated ‘draw kilns’ in which limestone and coal were fed into the kiln
continuously, and burnt together. The arrival of the railways ensured the
development of larger industrial complexes with kilns arranged in batteries
of two, three or more.^38
Liming and drainage were employed on enclosed pastures, on the lower
slopes, but were vital in the reclamation of the open moors. The most
extensive and permanent schemes of ‘improvement’ were in areas below
300 metres OD and towards the south and east of the main upland masses,
where moors were largely formed over podzols or acid brown earths and
where waterlogging was mainly caused by iron pan at no great depth.
Moorlands of this kind had already been reduced by encroachment and
enclosure through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the process
now continued on an increasing scale. Paring and burning, draining, liming
and re-seeding were all employed to convert the heather and rough grass
into improved pastures, often accompanied by deep ploughing to break up
the iron pan. Much of the better land was even converted to arable. As
prices rose in the 1790s and early 1800s, attention turned to the main blocks
of high, peat-covered plateaux, and to the bleak fells, large tracts of which
were enclosed by parliamentary acts. John Christian Curwen described in
his presidential address to the Workington Agricultural Society in 1812
the recent ‘disposition to carry the plough much nearer heaven than what