Station Of Critical Review By Kennedy Hiscox-Wormegay: The Fenland Soil Association Soil Grade Card

Given that this here estate on which the Hiscox-Wormegay family has lived, since times of ancient, is built upon fen muds, it makes sense of plenty to review, for your intellectual pleasure, the Fenland Soil Association Soil Grader. This item of equipment was devised by the invading Norman army, the engineers of which being so prodigiously unable to cope with more than type of soil that they had to produce a useful guide. Without this guide, it is entirely possible that Hereward the Wake might have been able to maintain his stranglehold on the fens and made mighty massacre of the French interlopers. That would have been good.

The Fenland Soil Association Soil Grader card.  A local person doesn't need this. They can taste the difference.
(Graphic by Gareth Monger)

The trained fen eye will immediately make mental note of fact that only two types of soil are on display upon this Old French document. As Canadians are about snow, we are about mud. Summer a single mud does not make. There are a hundred muds. Clay mud, sand mud, wet mud, wetter mud, watery mud, water with mud in.

I once saw a horse drown in mud, for which we erected the type 'horsey mud'. Horsey mud is hard to plough as the conditions are usually sufficient to produce plough-equipmenty mud.

The Fens: an artist's impression.
(Illustration by Gareth Monger)

And so it falls upon me to give reviewer grade to this device of soil grade. If this grader was of fen mind enough to include five hundred soils, I might consider more than one star. But it is failing in the highest possible magnitude. Therefore, no stars. No stars a night sky does not make. Good night.