I am always amazed that once the UK including Scotland was covered in thick woodlands. The Highlands as we know it are very different than the old days.
You can stil find remains of trees below soil in some areas
While it's true that if you leave a patch of land to its own devices currently, it gradually becomes scrub, then dense woodland, it turns out if there are deer and other large herbivores about they do quite a good job at reducing tree cover and turning the landscape into a variety of other ecosystems.
https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-for...
"This understanding has now been shown to be wholly inaccurate. Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As Oliver Rackham puts it in The History of the Countryside:
"It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even 20 years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads."Obviously there as loads more forest than now, but 1000 years ago it was about 15% forest, and now it's about 9%
This once popular belief or legend or myth connected to the forest myths of germany and Robin Hood and the idea of a primeval ancient woodland in the British deep dark past. Maybe also connected to a kind of romanticism of a past wild non-modern country.
There are dense forests in that region, including some that are primeval.
I had the good fortune to grow up next to a national park, and can speak un-ironically about tree-hugging.
Battle of Hürtgen Forest
I nearly choked on my lunch when I read that! haha
Even in the US, where land clearing has only been in practice for a few centuries, we’ve seen drastic changes to our landscape. I’d love to see how things looked before American chestnut trees went “extinct” and how people used them in the past. Apparently it was quite the resource.
What? The natives practiced slash-and-burn.
When I was growing up in Scotland, I'm reasonably sure I was told that 95% of Scotland was once covered by the Caledonian Forest. Certainly that's what I've been telling people since then:-) But according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caledonian_Forest it was estimated to have covered 15,000km2, whereas Scotland is 78,000km2, suggesting it was less than 20%.
I’m not convinced the wind has changed so much ;)