I42 TRANSACTIONS OF ROYAL SCOTTISH ARBORICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
19. The Value of Waste Land for Afforestation 
Purposes.! 
By A. C. Forses, Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. 
The term “waste land” is so vague that it is perhaps 
advisable to make some attempt to define what is meant by 
it in this paper to begin with. In the Returns of the Board of 
Agriculture, we do not find any land returned as “ waste,” but 
large areas are represented as consisting of “mountain and 
heath,” and to most of this class the term “waste” is usually 
applied by rural economists. But, although the definition of 
such land as waste may be relatively correct, we find, when 
we come to examine it in detail, that the greater part of it has 
been, and is still, utilised for several purposes which invest it 
with a low value, and that absolutely waste land in Great 
Britain is very limited in extent. The chief uses to which 
mountain and heath land is put vary slightly with the locality 
in which it exists, and it is necessary to glance at the distribution 
of this class of land in various parts of the country to ascertain 
what these uses are. 
As regards England, we find that waste land is chiefly 
confined to the south-west on the one hand and the northern 
counties on the other. Cornwall, Devonshire, Somerset, Dorset, 
Hampshire and Surrey possess the largest share in the former 
part of the country, typical specimens of which are found in 
the so-called forests of Exmoor and Dartmoor, the Quantock 
and Blackdown Hills, the stretches of gravelly heaths in the 
forests of Windsor, Woolmer, Bere and the New Forest, the 
commons of Surrey, and smaller areas elsewhere. In the north, 
the bulk of the waste land lies in the hill ranges which form 
the Pennine Chain, the Lake District, the Yorkshire moors and 
the fells of Northumberland along the Scottish Border. 
Considered as regards their spontaneous vegetation only, there 
is little difference between the waste lands in the two parts of 
the country. Both are covered with such surface growths as 
heather, bracken, rushes, Vaccinium, cotton grass and coarse 
grasses of low value for grazing purposes. But when soils and 
situations are examined, several important differences are noted. 
In the south, waste land is chiefly characterised by very poor, 
1 Read before the Royal Scottish Arboricultural Society, Ist August 1906. 
