160 OUR FORESTS AND WOODLANDS 
necessarily the best kinds that can be brought 
with profit on the market. Thus Gilpin says of 
the maple, ‘Its wood is of little value, and it 
is therefore rarely suffered to increase’; while 
Cobbett, in a passage very characteristic of his 
general style, says, ‘It is mere brushwood ; and 
of no more use as a tree, than the poppies, or 
wild parsnip, or wild carrot, are as cattle-food. 
Our Maple is a weed of the woods, and we burn 
it, because we know not what else to do with it. 
. .. The timber of our Sycamore is white and 
soft, and not valuable by any means.’ 
Fashion, shaped no doubt by necessity, has 
again swung back to the good opinion of the 
wood of both maple and sycamore held two 
hundred and fifty years ago. Sycamores of large 
size and good growth can be sold at prices 
running up to over two shillings a cubic foot, 
and much the same price could be obtained for 
maple if large supplies of it were available. 
And the capacity of both of these excellent 
timber trees for coming up as ‘a weed of the 
woods’ gives the clearest indication possible 
that their cultivation should be encouraged as 
largely as may be practicable in copses and high- 
