A wordabout the site itself. Evesham is the most proper
place of pilgrimage for the land-lover in England. You cannot point to any very special quality of soil (as you can in South Lincolnshire) or indeed of climate. Lisa clay is after all a sort of clay and regarded in some districts with little favour. Yet if any land falls vacant, whether on the alluvial soil of Offenham or round about Evesham (where to-day wall- flowers open under the opening plum blossom) it is taken at prices up to £150 an acre. The annual rent per acre is often a pound or two more than the freehold purchase price of acres not more than twenty miles away. Times have not been good ; but the small-holders of Worcestershire say little, tighten their belts, and enrich their soil with a sturdy con- fidence in themselves and their holdings that nothing can abate. Tradition goes for a good deal. How much more fruit would be planted (for example, in the cider districts of Hereford) if " the Evesham custom " were a national custom. Skill in marketing is as conspicuous as skill in cultivation ; it is not only, perhaps not chiefly, that the spring cabbage and the Pershore plum find their optimum of conditions.
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