Great Land-reclaimers
Not even the Holkham district of Norfolk or the country in the neigh- bourhood of Whittlesea in the shires of Cambridge and Huntingdon owe more to Coke of Norfolk and successive Dukes of Bedford than the wolds of Lincoln (the very opposite of the Holland "marshes ") to great county landlords, those half-extinct benefactors. Lord Yarborough's taming of wide waste spaces in Lincolnshire was as true an act of re- clamation as the draining of Whittlesea mere, and one result was that, while other purely agricultural districts (as notably on the upland side of Huntingdon) were fast losing population, Lincolnshire gained. No- where else are the extensive farm, with its need of mechanisation, and the intensive farm worked by hand in small holdings more abruptly and suggestively contrasted. Some day perhaps the English will do to parts of the Wash what the Dutch, always pioneers in intensive cultivation, have already done to the Zuider Zee.
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