REMARKS ON FOREST SCENERY, AND OTHER WOODLAND VIEWS. BY THE LATE WILLIAM GILPIN, A.M. EDITED BY SIR THOMAS DICK LAUDER, BART. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. II. EDINBURGH: FRASER & CO. NORTH BRIDGE; SMITH, ELDER & CO. CORNHILL, LONDON; W. CURRY, JUN. & CO. DUBLIN. MDCCCXXXIV. BRITAIN, like other countries, abounded once in wood. When Cassibalan, Caractacus, and Boadicea, defended their country's rights, the country itself was a fortress. An extensive plain was then as uncommon as a forest is now. Fitz-Stephen, a monk of Canterbury, in the time of Henry II, tells us, that a large forest lay round London, " in which were woody groves, in the coverts whereof lurked bucks and does, wild boars, and bulls." To shelter beasts of the latter kind, we know a forest must be of some magnificence. These woods, contiguous even to the capital, continued close and thick, many ages afterwards. Even so late as Henry VII's time, we are informed by Polidore Virgil, that Tertia propemodum Angliæ pars pecori, aut cervis, damis, capreolis (nam et ii quoque in ea parte sunt, quæ ad septentrionem est) cuniculisve nutriendis relicta est inculta: quippe passim sunt ejusmodi ferarum vivaria, seu roboraria, quæ lignis roboreis sunt clausa unde multa venatio, qua se nobiles cum primis exercent." * * Almost the third part of England is uncultivated, and possessed only by stags, deer, or wild goats, which last are found chiefly in the northern parts. Rabbits, too, abound everywhere. You everywhere meet with vast forests, where these wild beasts range at large, or with parks secured by pales. Hunting is the principal amusement of all the people of distinction. In this passage the forest seems to be distinguished from the park, which latter was fenced, in those days, with oak pales, as it is now. As Britain became more cultivated, its woods, of course, receded. They gave way, as in other places, to the plough, to pasturage, to ship building, to architecture, and all other objects of human industry in which timber is the principal material; obtaining, for that reason, among the Romans, the pointed appellation of materies. That our woods were often cut down, merely for the sake of tillage and pasturage, without any respect to the uses of timber, seems to be evident, from the great quantities of subterraneous trees dug up in various parts of England. They are chiefly found in marshy grounds, which abounded, indeed, every where, before the arts of draining were in use. Nothing was necessary, in such places, to produce the future phenomenon of subterraneous timber, but to carry the trees upon the surface of the bog, which might easily be done in dry summers. Their own weight, the oozing of the springs, and the swelling of the mossy ground, would soon sink them, as they were generally stripped of their branches, which were probably burned. Dr Plot, who had examined subterraneous timber with great exactness, gives good reasons for supposing it might have been buried in this way, merely to make way for the plough, and imagines that the English might begin to clear their woodlands, for tillage, as early as the times of Alfred the Great.* Others account for the phenomenon of subterraneous timber, from the havoc made in woods by the violence of storms. In marshy grounds, especially, where trees take but feeble hold, they would be most liable to this destruction. Both this hypothesis and Dr Plot's may be equally true. We have perhaps had occasion to examine as many of these subterranean trees as Dr Plot, though we did so in a different country, and should therefore hesitate to venture to question the particulars of his theory, so far as Oxford * See Plot's History of Oxfordshire, chap. vi. sec. 56. |