A-Photo-A-Day no 1

[enitharmon]

Barrow has existed as a town only since about 1840. Before that was nothing but a few scattered farming communities.

Walney has been settled much longer than that. The huddled village of Biggar and the little fishing community of North Scale have some old buildings to show for it. Much more eloquent, however, are these relics of mediaeval farming, right on the Furness Golf Club's course and close to the beach at Sandy Gap. The corduroy undulations of ridge and furrow were formed by generations of strip farmers, turning the furrows with teams of oxen. Nobody knows for sure why these humps and hollows were made the way they were, but one plausible theory is that it was a form of insurance against the vagaries of the weather - in a dry season the furrows would retain water to save some of the crop, and conversely in a wet season the raised ridges would be well drained.

Ridge and furrow is common all round the country where this method of farming prevailed, but is generally only seen where the land has not been put to the plough, so the sheep-lands of Furness are a good place to see it. Strip farming was common up to the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century; it seems likely that Enclosure was late coming to this wild corner of England where growing crops can only ever have been a marginal activity.