 In 1795, John Billingsley advocated enclosure and the digging of rhynes (a local name for drainage channels, pronounced "reens" in the east and rhyne to the west) between plots, and wrote in his "Agriculture of the County of Somerset" that had been enclosed in the last 20 years in Wedmore and Meare, at Nyland, at Blackford, at Mark, in Shapwick, and at Westhay.In the 1810s Samuel Galton, Jr. showed that bogs could be drained and dressed with clay and other soil, and built Galton's Canal.The character of the soil was also changed by the spreading of clay and silt from the digging of King's Sedgemoor Drain.