EXTENT OF ANCIENT FORESTS. 63 



southern part of Scotland, it makes a considerable bend, 

 forming the segment of a circle. In the central 

 English counties it is from twenty to forty miles in 

 width, but it expands as it proceeds northwards. It is 

 much broader as it traverses our northern counties, and 

 when it arrives in Scotland, and has the Cheviots as its 

 right arm, it is a hundred miles in breadth. It narrows 

 again somewhat when it approaches the river Clyde, but 

 rapidly widening again, embraces the whole of the 

 northern Highlands, at least a hundred miles in width 

 at their broadest part. It includes within its range all 

 the highest mountains in Britain, and, with the ex- 

 ception of those of Wales and Devonshire, almost all the 

 secondary ones. 



But I have only described the mere skeleton of this 

 rocky district, which forms the backbone of our island 

 through two-thirds of its length. In ancient times its 

 large area — much of it even now in a very wild state — 

 was one enormous mass of mountains, deep and wild 

 glens, forests, moors, and morasses intermixed. These 

 last often extended into the lower country, far beyond 

 the limits I have named. Nothing we have now left can 

 give us any idea of the state of things then : not the 

 moors of North Derbyshire, West Yorkshire, and Lanca- 

 shire, the wild wastes of Westmoreland, Cumberland, 

 and Northumberland, nor even the extensive deer forests 

 and moors of the Scottish Highlands ; for the pathless 

 woods which then covered a great part of these districts 

 are all gone, and so also are the thick forests which, out- 

 side of, but connected with them, skirted these higher 

 grounds. The advance of man and the progress of cul- 

 tivation has destroyed most of these wild woods ; but it 

 was not so in late Saxon or in early Norman times. 



