Talk:Ridge and furrow

Untitled

The ridge and furrow topic deserves much more consideration. I offer a brief outline of my understanding.

In the UK the measurements were one chain (22 yards) wide by one furlong (220 yards)which is exactly one acre. This was the area that could be ploughed by one man with one horse and a plough in one day. Hopefully this could be done in eight hours which was regarded as all that could be expected from a horse in one day allowing for breaks for rest and food and the day light hours. Hence man and society came to adopt an eight hour day as reasonable although actually the man was required to prepare the horse and tackle before the eight hour day started and he was also expected to care for the horse and tackle after the days work was done by the horse. Probably there were other expectations from womenfolk.

Selective breeding of the horses gave rise to several large breeds of heavy horses that were good for this work.

Rubble was often burried in the furrows and this was happening in the eleventh century. By the seventeenth century unglazed ceramic pipes were laid in trenches in the furrows to facilitate drainage. These pipes drained into open ditches which were usually near the hedges.

"Hedging and ditching" was an annual maintenance task on farms. Materials were grown on site. Thorn bushes could be "laid" to make the stock proof barrier and ash grew quickly and straight and was cut and might be "laid" which allowed some growth to continue or cut out and driven in as a supporting post.

The system of ridges and furrows and land drains seems to have evolved by trial and error over the centuries and made an major contribution to sustainable systems of land and water management. Currently there seems to be renewed interest in this whole subject of managing the water table as well as the surface water, salinity and acidity. Such things are absolutely critical to harvesting solar energy organically. 01:02, 2 June 2007 (UTC)124.168.2.147Jo

Surviving Locations

This list of English counties is not too useful as it stands; in particular, I see little benefit in linking each name to the main Wikipedia entry for the county. A better job could be done by a map. However this bring the essentially Anglocentric bias into focus - do we really believe that no ridge and furrow survives in Wales, Scotland, or Ireland?? I don't know about the Continent. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Manninagh1958 (talk • contribs) 09:43, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

@Manninagh1958: This source published this year says that ridge and furrow is particularly common in northern Europe. That might explain why the German and Danish Wikipedias have their own versions of this topic but the Italian Wikipedia looks to be a translation of this page. I just went through Wikidata tagging pages which were obviously about ridge and furrow. The downside is, the info we have is restricted to England as seen in this map.

Perhaps in the 'surviving locations' setting it would be worth pointing out that while the examples are from England ridge and furrow was used across northern Europe. That way we keep some useful information, while allowing for the fact it is skewed towards England. Nev1 (talk) 10:54, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

This comes with the caveat that the information in Wikidata comes from the National Heritage List for England, and even then only scheduled monuments so there are many more instances unaccounted for. Coflein (the database for Wales) and Canmore (the database for Scotland) both have info of sites which haven't been imported. Other countries may have similar databases which haven't been imported. Nev1 (talk) 11:05, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

The single-sentence paragraph about Scotland, below the list of English counties, seems to suggest that Scottish rig and furrow is rare, or confined to an area around Airdrie (I think because this was edited down when the photo was added – the original text claimed these were "some of the best examples in the UK"). I doubt this is the case or that rig and furrow is restricted to Airdrie (the video in the External links section is apparently shot near Stewarton in Ayrshire) but I don't know enough about the subject, particularly in Scotland, to put it right. Dave.Dunford (talk) 15:26, 22 August 2018 (UTC)

Width

20m wide ? More like 4-5 metres !

http://www.geograph.org.uk/search.php?i=3741017&page=1 for a wide survey. --195.137.93.171 (talk) 02:18, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Interesting set of photos. The spacing cannot be estimated on most of them, but on those that can (for example by counting fence posts), they seem to be at least 15m crest to crest.

The single ref we had mentions (bottom of p 86) one measurement: "forty perches by four". As a perch is around 20 feet (depending on location and date), this gives the width of the strip as 80 feet, which is around 25 yards or around, um, 20 metres.

However, the diagram in the same ref (p 88) has a scale which indicates that the width in this case is about 6 yards or nearly 5 m, close to your suggestion. This ref mentions 22 feet, which is around 7 m – though elsewhere in that ref it says "Width and direction of furrowing may well change several times within the boundaries of a single field". This ref gives two ranges for two particular sites: "between 4.5 and 5 metres" "in the 3 to 6 metres range". Yet another ref says that "Typically each ridge measured a quarter of an acre in area - 11 yards (8m) wide, and 220 yards (200m) long". Later it mentions ridges from 2m to 20m in width.

I've tried to incorporate the above into the article. Richard New Forest (talk) 19:58, 25 January 2010 (UTC)

Consistency in unit conversions

In the lead this article converts inches into centimetres, "up to 24 inches (61 cm) tall". In the "Origin" section it converts inches into metres, ""a height difference of 18 to 24 in (0.5 to 0.6 m)"

In matters like this it's important that the article is internally consistent. Personally I think for values in this range, centimetres is the better unit, but I don't know if metres is the correct academic usage or something like that so I've not changed either. Thryduulf (talk) 01:25, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

A small number of inches is converted to centimetres, a larger number to metres: that does not seem all that inconsistent – it's always tricky of course as the boundaries between inches and feet and between centimetres and metres are not in the same place. However, as the measurements are all rather imprecise anyway, could change the first to metres if it really offends you. Richard New Forest (talk) 18:03, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Except they're not different numbers of inches - they're both 24. Thryduulf (talk) 21:59, 26 May 2011 (UTC)

Bibliography

I propose that we add a Bibliography section where we can place the continental reference and alsowhich is highly relevant (for England)and has a county gazetteer! Manninagh1958 (talk) 17:34, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! Nev1 (talk) 00:17, 21 August 2016 (UTC)

References

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?Eurocentric?

I came here because the Wikipedia page of the Chanyuan Treaty between the Song ("the south") and Liao ("the north") dynasties says that one of the agreements was that, "Neither the north nor the south shall grant licenses to sow or reap furrowed fields". I'm not sure why this would be in the treaty -- my best guess us that they're saying the governments shouldn't give land that's already being farmed to other people -- but, whyever it's there, it seems to imply (to my very limited understanding) that this sort of structure existed in China too; which seems logical to me, since it should exist wherever people have used ploughs to farm. I suppose, more precisely, it would only happen where people have ploughed "with non-reversible ploughs on the same strip of land each year." Was that not done outside of Europe, though?DubleH (talk) 21:19, 16 April 2022 (UTC)