A Brief History of British Woodlands
Around 13,000 years ago (11,000 BC) the last glaciers and ice sheets of the Ice Age melted, the frozen ground thawed and the climate in Britain improved sufficiently to allow trees to return from those areas of Western Europe which had remained outside the grip of the freezing conditions. Wind - borne seeds and those spread through the droppings of birds and animals gradually colonised the British Isles from the south - east. From the evidence provided through the study of pollen grains which came to rest in bogs, lakes and ponds we have been able to discover that the first trees to take root in Britain after the Ice Age were arctic trees such as Aspen, Birch and Willow. Pine, Hazel, Alder and Oak followed these, which were in turn followed by Elm and Lime. Finally came the Ash, Holly, Hornbeam and Maple, which found it more difficult to spread over a wide area as the bare ground had already been colonised by the earlier arrivals.
A period of adjustment followed as the various species jostled for territory, with each variety of trees pushing some species out of some locations and giving way to others in different locations. Finally, around 4,000 years ago, the wild-wood (a name coined by the Cambridge ecologist Oliver Rackham to describe woodland as it was before human beings began to make their mark on the landscape) was fully developed.
Although there would have been some local variations, the general picture that we can trace from the pollen records shows that the extreme north of Scotland was still tundra and practically treeless like northern Norway and Sweden today. The north - west Highlands of Scotland were mainly covered by Birch forests, whereas the eastern Highlands were covered by Pine. The rest of Scotland, northern England, the north midlands, most of Wales and the south - west were dominated by Oak and Hazel forest whilst Hazel and Elm occupied south - west Wales and most of Cornwall. Woods in which Lime was the most common tree covered the remainder of England. The Sheffield area is in the interesting position of being close to the boundary between the Oak - Hazel region and the Lime region and this variety is still reflected in the local woodland today.
Humans began their deliberate clearance of the wild-wood around 6,000 years ago, although the amount of woodland that was more or less permanently cleared in the period that followed, up to the time of the Domesday survey in 1086, must have varied greatly from region to region and from district to district. What has become increasingly clear through investigation is that a great deal of woodland had been cleared by Norman times and the country was not mainly covered by the wild-wood as many of us imagine. In fact in many areas what we think of as typical 20th century English countryside, with hedged or walled fields, winding lanes, farms, hamlets, villages and scattered woods was already in place and had been for centuries.
In his book Sheffield's Woodland Heritage Mel Jones calculates that just less than 13 per cent of South Yorkshire was wooded at the time of the Domesday survey. The area now covered by Sheffield Metropolitan District had a woodland coverage of 22.5 per cent (about a fifth of the total area) compared with 6.6 per cent coverage of woodland and plantations today.
The Domesday records show that woodland coverage in South Yorkshire was uneven with a shortage in the east of the county and much wider coverage in the west, including the Sheffield area. The population around the Sheffield area would have been reasonably thin on the ground and the woods would have been used for the produce from the trees and also as pasture for sheep, pigs and cattle. These types of woods are known as wood pasture. As the population grew, demands upon timber for houses, boats, tools and other products increased, combined with the pressure from the grazing animals that prevented regrowth of the woodland. Woods became scarce and valuable resources and had to be fenced to prevent the animals entering them. To cope with these pressures, a type of woodland management began to be introduced which allowed a continuous and self - renewing supply of trees to be available through a process of cutting the trees to ground level and allowing them to grow up again. This is known as coppicing - see Coppice Management.
The woodland of South Yorkshire at the time of the Domesday survey was put into four different categories: silva, silva modica, silva minuta and silva pastilis. Silva is simply a term for woodland we are not sure of the meaning of silva modica, silva minuta is coppice and silva pastilis is wood pasture. From a total of the 111 places in which woodland was recorded in South Yorkshire, seven had coppice woods and 102 had woodland pastures.
In the centuries that followed Domesday, wood pasture continued to be popular in South Yorkshire, especially in deer parks and on wooded commons. Coppice management gradually became more widespread in order to conserve supplies of wood which were increasingly in short supply, as the population continued to grow and more woodland was cleared to make way for agriculture.
