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Show 292 DENUDATION OF TilE LAND. CnAP. VI. two inches in 10 years. Therefore in so long a period as 2000 years, a large amount of earth will have been repeatedly brought to the surface on most old embankments and tumuli, especially on the talus . round their bases and much of this earth will have been wash~d completely away. We may therefore conclude that all ancient mounds, when not formed of materials unfavourable to worms, will have been somewhat lowered in tho course of centuries, although their inclinations may not have been greatly changed. Fields formerly ploughed.-From . a very remote period and in many countnes, land has been ploughed, so that convex beds, called crowns or ridges, usually about 8 feet across and separated by furrows, have been thrown up. The furrows are directed so as to carry off the surface water. . In my attemptA to ascertain how long a time these crowns and furrows last, when ploughed land has been converted into pasture, obstacles of many kinds were encountered. It is rarely known when a field was last ploughed; and some fields which were thought to have been in pasture from time immemorial were after- CnaP. VI. ANCIENTLY PLOUGIIED FIELDS. 293 wards djscovered to have been ploughed only 50 or 60 years before. During the early part of the present century, when the price of corn was very high, land of all kinds seems to have been ploughed in Britain. There is, however, no reason to doubt that in many cases the old crowns and furrows have been preserved from a very ancient period.* 1,hat they should have been preserved for very unequal lengths of time wonld naturally follow from the crowns, when first thrown up, having differed much in height in different districts, as is now the caBe with recently ploughed land. In old pasture fields, the mould, wherever measurements were made, was found to be from ! to 2 inches thicker in the furrows than • Mr. E. Tylor in his Presidential address ('Journal of the Anthropological Institute,' May 1880, p. 451) remarks: "lt appears fmm several papers of the Berlin Society as to the German 'high-fields' or 'heathen-fields' ( l:Iochacker, and. Heidenacker) tbat they correspond much in their situation on hills and wastes with tho ' elf-funows' of Scotland, which popular mythology accounts for by tho story of the fields having been put under a Papal interdict, ::;o that people took to cultivating the hills. 1,here seems reason to suppose that, like the tilled plots in the Swedish forests which tradition ascribes to the ol<.l 'hackers,' the German heathen-fields represent tillage by an ancient and barbaric population." |
