Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chippy | Hacker News Reader

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I've heard that the popular idea that the UK was covered in dense forest after the ice age until modern times is mostly erroneous these days. Even around 4000BC-1000BC humans were up there farming and clearing quite quickly.

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.

>"popular idea that the UK was covered in dense forest after the ice age until modern times is mostly erroneous these days"

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%.

If you look around you’ll notice the trees are usually only growing on one side of a hill, the wind gets anything else before it’s strong enough to withstand it (at least on the west coast where I’m from)

> even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex

I nearly choked on my lunch when I read that! haha

Having no prior indoctrination or opinion I had always just assumed it would have coincided with proliferation of agricultural. Whoever says the forests disappeared 1000 years ago, after agriculture had been in full swing for millennia, makes a weak argument without some supporting evidence.

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.

> the US, where land clearing has only been in practice for a few centuries

What? The natives practiced slash-and-burn.

Not to the extent of Europe circa 1492

Almost certainly true, though be aware that the Columbian Exchange resulted in a dramatic reforestation of the Americas as the people that had been keeping the forest in check died off. This is often viewed as the cause of the Little Ice Age.

> forest myths of germany and Robin Hood

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_H%C3%BCrtgen_Forest

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