Ridge and Furrow - Origin

Origin

Traditional ploughs turn the soil over in one direction, with the ploughshare and moldboard to the right (see Single-sided ploughing). This means that the plough cannot return along the same furrow. Instead, ploughing is done in a clockwise direction around a long rectangular strip (a land). After ploughing one of the long sides of the strip, the plough is removed from the ground, moved across the unploughed headland (the short end of the strip), then put back in the ground to work back down the other long side of the strip. The width of the ploughed strip is fairly narrow, to avoid having to drag the plough too far across the headland.

This process has the effect of moving the soil in each half of the strip one furrow's-width towards the centre line.

In the Middle Ages each strip was managed by one small family, within large open fields held in common (see strip cultivation), and the location of the ploughing was the same each year. The movement of soil year after year gradually built the centre of the strip up into a ridge, leaving a dip, or "furrow" between each ridge (note that this use of "furrow" is different from that for the furrow left by each pass of the plough). The building up of a ridge was called filling or gathering, and was sometimes done before ploughing began. The raised ridges offered better drainage in a wet climate: moisture drained into the furrows, and since the ridges were laid down a slope, in a sloping field water would collect in a ditch at the bottom. Only on some well-drained soils were the fields left flat. In damper soil towards the base of the ridge, pulses might be sown where wheat would have been drowned, as Thomas Tusser suggests in the 16th century:

For wheat ill land
Where water doth stand.
Sow pease or dredge
below in that redge.

The dip often marked the boundary between plots. Although they varied, strips would traditionally be a furlong (a "furrow-long") in length, (220 yards, about 200 metres), and from about 5 yards (4.6 m) up to a chain wide (22 yards, about 20 metres), giving an area of from 0.25 to 1 acre (0.1 to 0.4 ha).

In most places ploughing continued over the centuries, and later methods removed the ridge and furrow pattern. However, in some cases the land became grassland, and where this has not been ploughed since, the pattern has often been preserved. Surviving ridge and furrow may have a height difference of 18 to 24 in (0.5 to 0.6 m) in places, and gives a strongly rippled effect to the landscape. When in active use, the height difference was even more, over 6 feet (1.8 m) in places.