ABSTRACT
In terms of land use, forestry in the UK has always been the “poor cousin” of agriculture. Although the prehistoric “natural” condition of the land was as forest, the influence of man in the British Isles has established a long tradition of clear-felling and substitution into agricultural use. This trend was most marked during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when adoption of advanced husbandry techniques and subsequent enclosure of common land allowed agriculture to confine UK forestry to marginal areas and a few private parklands, operated on a noncommercial basis for private amenity values (Rackham, 1976). By 1900, only 4 per cent of England and Wales and 2 per cent of Scotland and Ireland was under forestry, these being by far the lowest levels in Europe (ibid.). Pure market forces have therefore mitigated heavily against forestry in the UK, and the comparative recovery of the UK forestry stock witnessed throughout the twentieth century has been almost entirely the product of government intervention.
