ABSTRACT
There was a time when ‘forest’ did not mean so much a place of trees as a place for deer and other game. Indeed, the medieval meaning still applies to large expanses of almost treeless ‘deer forest’ in Scotland. With the disappearance of deer and other large herbivores over much of Britain, the modern vernacular use of the word has come to mean little other than the trees. The sense of a functional forest, both as an ecological entity or a cultural one, has been lost along with the large mammals.
