IELTS Practice Test 4

Reading Passage: The Seed Circles of Hester Dunmore

A Hester Dunmore (1841–1913) spent almost her entire life within a few miles of the hill parish where she was born, the daughter of a miller. At nineteen she became mistress of the village school, a post she held for more than forty years. Local histories, when they mention her at all, usually remember her for a small book of pressed wild flowers that she produced with her pupils. Yet her more lasting achievement was something far less decorative: a network of 'seed circles', in which farming households lent one another seed grain and kept careful account of what came back.

B The idea grew out of a disaster. The summer of 1867 was exceptionally wet, and across the parish the barley rotted in the fields. Families who had sown a single variety, often one recommended by a travelling merchant, lost nearly everything. Dunmore noticed, however, that an elderly neighbour, Josiah Kettle, who still grew several old local varieties in narrow strips side by side, harvested enough to feed his household and to share a little besides. Some of his varieties had failed as badly as anyone's, but others had ripened early enough to escape the worst of the rain. The lesson she drew was not that old seed was better than new, but that a mixture spread the risk. Saving seed from one harvest to sow the next was nothing new — farmers in the valley had done so for generations — but nobody, as far as she could tell, had tried to organise it across a whole community.

C She began in the spring of 1869 with eleven households. Each borrowed a measured quantity of seed from a common store and, after the harvest, returned twice that amount, so that the store grew from year to year. The seed was kept in labelled linen bags on shelves at the back of the schoolroom, where it stayed dry and could be checked by anyone. Dunmore's older pupils weighed every loan and every return and entered the figures in a ledger, together with the name of the variety and the field where it had been grown; she later wrote that no arithmetic lesson had ever held their attention so well. The arrangement proved popular. Neighbouring parishes copied it, sometimes after a visit from Dunmore herself, and by 1880 there were circles in fourteen parishes.

D Not everyone welcomed the circles. Ambrose Thale, a seed merchant in the market town, wrote a series of letters to the county newspaper describing the old varieties as 'the leavings of a less enlightened age' and complaining that a scheme which kept farmers out of his shop was damaging honest trade. Several agricultural improvers, who were then promoting new high-yielding varieties, took his side. The parish vicar, the Reverend Silas Orrin, at first objected to grain being stored in a schoolroom, fearing that it would attract rats, but he withdrew his objection after inspecting the shelves himself. Dunmore's own reply to Thale, published in the same newspaper, was notably mild. She had no quarrel with new varieties, she wrote; she asked only that they be grown alongside the old ones for a few seasons, so that farmers could judge them by results rather than by advertisements.

E How much difference did the circles make? Dunmore's ledgers suggest an answer for at least one year. The harvest of 1879 was another poor one, and the figures show that households belonging to a circle lost a markedly smaller share of their crop than other households in the parish. Historians disagree, though, about what such numbers can prove. Dr Naomi Achterberg, who has spent a decade working through the ledgers, argues that the circles' greatest achievement was not any single harvest but the habit of systematic record-keeping they created among people who had rarely written anything down. Professor Callum Reddaway is more cautious. The ledgers, he points out, were kept by children, contain gaps and occasional arithmetic errors, and cannot show whether circle members were simply better farmers to begin with. He nonetheless calls them 'an unusually rich source' for the history of rural life.

F After Dunmore's death in 1913, the circles declined. Commercial seed was becoming cheaper, and the railway, which had reached the valley in the 1890s, meant that a merchant's order could arrive within days. Younger farmers saw little reason to keep a common store when they could buy what they needed. By 1930 only two circles remained, and the ledgers themselves disappeared from view. They were rediscovered in 1974 by a builder repairing the roof of a disused chapel, packed in a tea chest in the attic, and are now held at the county record office. Plant breeders searching for old varieties that might cope with wetter summers have begun to consult them — an unexpected afterlife for a schoolroom exercise.