Rural England Author:Henry Rider Haggard Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HUNTINGDONSHIRE Middlesex and Rutland excepted, Huntingdonshire, with an area of about 234,000 acres, is the smallest county in England. Its length from north... more » to south is thirty miles and its breadth from east to west twenty-three. The northern part of the county is chiefly fen-land, while the southern, which lies in the basin of the Ouse, is higher. The soil, especially in the middle of the shire, is Oxford clay, but varies a good deal; thus in the south-east there is much ironsand and gault, and in the north, stone-brash, the northeast being for the most part fen. Huntingdonshire, which is almost purely agricultural, produces the usual crops, including a great deal of wheat. There is also much grazing land on which many cattle are fatted. On the whole the county is not well supplied with water, for which the inhabitants in some parts are obliged to rely on ponds. The drained fen-land is very productive. Between Cambridge and Sandy, in Bedfordshire, especially in the neighbourhood of the Old North Road, may be seen a stretch of land, of which the condition can fitly be described as awful. The soil is for the most part a heavy clay, and much of it has gone down into an apology for pasture, often so thickly studded with wild thorns and briars, that it looks like a game covert which has been recently planted. Here was a crop of beans, dwarfed, yellow, and devoured with black fly. Next to it, perhaps, appeared a field of corn, thin in growth, light in ear and straw, and, to judge from the docks and flowering thistles, innocent of the hoe. Beyond that, again, lay a fallow, or what was meant to be a fallow, but, having been left untouched since thespring ploughing was now but a bed of weeds. Then another bean patch black with ' collier,' and one of the worst fields of wheat that ...« less