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: THE LEVELS. No. IV. It is astonishing to see the crops grown on these Levels; fifteen and sixteen loads of wheat per acre; sixty or seventy sacks of potatoes per acre; with oats and barley bending to the ground by their weight of golden grain. As to Mangold Wurzel the danger is in its eventually swallowing up the land altogether. Imagine the farmer delving through deep, dense fathoms of Mangold Wurzel. Not always was it thus. Little more than two centuries ago this locality was a swamp (that is the proper term for it, )?a great broad swamp. There were, it is true, considerable patches of green earth, but the lower districts presented nothing but a watery landscape, with here and there a hillock on which a few starved rushes tried to get as far as possible from the water, and where the frogs croaked in undisturbed dominion. This country being so exceedingly flat, and lying below the level of the tide in the adjacent rivers, the water had no chance of escape. Out of the 180,000 acres composing the Chase about 70,000 were either completely submerged or liable to periodical inundations. To any one not cradled in a land of bogs the idea of reclaiming this district, not by any partial modifications but by one grand concentrated effort, would have appeared simply a delusion. Even in comparison with our days of Leviathan steam ships and ocean telegrams, the great Dutchman’s achievements appear truly titanic ?embanking and turning the course of rivers, and reclaiming out of a vast morass 70,000 acres, which are now ranked amongst the most productive land in Yorkshire. But let us look carefully at this great drainage in its origin and progress. I have met with several old manuscript records of the drainage of Hatfield Chase, each purporting to be written by one who was a witnes…