ABSTRACT
By the late Georgian period, about the end of the eighteenth century, it was becoming the practice to bring the cattle off the fields as the year declined, and to in-winter them in yards and later in cattle houses or covered yards. There was money then in the pockets of landowners and farmers, if not of their labourers. And there was still money in farming after the repeal in 1846 of the Corn Laws, which had given protection against imported grain, right up to the collapse of British farming in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, when the grain of the North American prairies, the tinned and later refrigerated meat of Argentina, the meat, butter and cheese of Australia, New Zealand and Denmark began to come flooding in. The original buildings which form the farmstead of the typical lowland farm often date from that period of about one hundred years. They were set up and indeed carefully designed for the horses and cows, the bulls and bullocks, the pigs, the hens scratching about the yard, the ploughing, threshing, storage and dairying of that period.
