VILLAGE DISAPPEARS

Greymouth Evening Star, 21 July 1927, Page 2

VILLAGE DISAPPEARS

SNAPE AND ITS FATE. It seems almost unbelievable that a real village in the heart of England, inhabited by real people, can have vanished in recent years without anyone hearing about it, but Sir William Beach Thomas, an authority on agriculture, vouches for the fact. The village is, or was, Snape, three miles from Marlborough, Wiltshire, and its disappearance is cited by Sir William Beach Thomas—in a pamphlet called “How England Becomes Prairie” —as an illustration of the effect of a revolution which is beginning in English country life. This revolution is the sweeping of hedges out of existence, the rolling of 40 or 50 farms into one enormous farm of perhaps, 20,000 acres, the disappearance of the greater part of the population, the collapse of most of the farm buildings and cottages, and the conversion of the land into a grain “ranch," ploughed, sown and reaped by movable gangs of men, or its collapse into “prairie” overgrown with weeds, where cattle or sheep, bought elsewhere and not bred on the land, are grazed for a brief period before being sold again. This revolution has already made headway in Berkshire and Wiltshire, where, according to Sir William, it is possible to walk for nine or ten miles without going off one farming family’s land, and almost without seeing a human being at work.

Snape existed where the lowland near Marlborough begins to rise into downs. It is an area of the countryside that has been transformed by the introduction of “prairie” farming. “A few years ago,” writes Sir William, “a charming and prosperous village stood on the edge and commanded a view of a wide prospect of corn and cultivated land, all of it producing its quota of food ahd supporting a vigorous population. “In the village or hamlet of Snape . . . . were two good farmhouses, a school, a chapel and 14 cottages; as many as 44 children attended the school To-day the hamlet is no more seen. It has clean vanished. One rough shepherd and his dog, who live elsewhere, represent the whole extinct hamlet. Snape is like Flors or any of those French villages that felt the full force of war bombardment. You might put up such a notice as was put up on the Somme: ‘Here was Snape.’ ” The village has fallen down and is now almost indiscoverable.

Sir William explains that the revolution has been followed by the fall in the price of corn. A few farmers have discovered that money can be made by reducing the number of people they employ to the lowest possible number, and either raising grain crops on large areas, with the use of steam ploughs and other machinery, or by letting the land “fall down” to grass and weeds and using it for grazing. The result in both cases, he says, is to depopulate the land, to lower its agricultural value and to encourage the multiplication of weeds.