Volume 6

598
a condition to bear abundance of grass, and that the richer it had been
made by manure when it was converted into pasturage, its fertility will
increase the faster. It was found at the same time that land is rendered
more productive by taking it at intervals from pasture to tillage, whereby
the vegetable substances which had accumulated on the surface are incor-
porated with the soil so as to enrich it. Hence it is that alternations of
tillage and grass are now the general practice throughout this district, little
land being now kept long in tillage without being laid into grass. The little
swampy plains among the eminences on both sides of this shire are the only
perpetual meadows.
The advantages arising from enclosures appear not to have escaped the
husbandman of this county at an early period, because enclosures had been
enforced by ancient statutes. The spirit for enclosing, which seems to have
been suspended for many years, remained about the epoch of 1748, and has
proceeded with great perseverance ever since that happy epoch.
Of draining, the great business seems to be to carry off the water lodging on
the surface, which can only be done in open drains. The numerous dikes which
had been made for enclosing, though frequently not answering the purposes of
enclosing, are very useful conductors of water. The draining ground where
water does not lodge is principally performed by the manner of laying out the
ridges. The same drainage which is used in other districts for other lands are
generally practised in Lanarkshire.
Summer fallowing is practised, either with design to free the ground from
weeds to give the ridges a proper direction, or to open a close soil. But since
the turnip husbandry has been introduced into the upper country, the land is
fallowed in the spring or the beginning of summer, when turnips are sown upon
it in drills. The clearing of the ground is completed by hoeing the intervals.
In the light soils of the lower part of the country the land is rented too high
for the turnip husbandry; potatoes, for which there is a prodigious demand in
that very populous district, are substituted for turnips, and the ground is
cleared from weeds by hoeing them attentively.
Little marie of a valuable quality has yet been discovered in this shire.
Some, indeed, has been found under the mosses in the upper parts of Carn-
wath and Lesmahagow parishes, but the land is too high there to encourage
the cultivation of corn to any great extent, and the distance is too great to
carry the marie with advantage to the corn lands below. Marie of an
inferior quality has also been found in some places within the lower parts
of the country, lying commonly between two strata of freestone rock, and
would probably be expensive to work. And, moreover, it is not the most