Area of Uncultivated Land 63 



Of these heads we may count the two first as " culti- 

 vation," though a great deal of permanent pasture that is 

 not regularly manured consists of more or less modified 

 semi-natural plant-communities. It is impossible to say 

 how much of the land under trees is to be reckoned as 

 plantation in the narrower sense of the word, i.e. planta- 

 tions on previously open land, but there is good reason to 

 believe that the great bulk of British woodland is semi- 

 natural, in the sense of representing types of wood origin- 

 ally native to the country\ Mountain and heathland 

 used for grazing is certainly to be reckoned as bearing 

 essentially natural vegetation. The next heading includes 

 two very dissimilar categories, on the one hand land so 

 barren and remote that it is removed altogether from the 

 pastoral industry, and on the other hand the land covered 

 by cities, towns, and villages of all sizes and by isolated 

 houses with their parks and gardens. It is unfortunately 

 impossible from any published or accessible data to deter- 

 mine the relative extents of these two categories of land, 

 but we shall be safe in inferring that while the latter 

 must form a relatively large proportion in England, the 

 former must greatly preponderate in Wales, Scotland and 

 Ireland. 



Thus we arrive at the foUowiug approximate per- 

 centages : 



England Wales Scotland Ireland ^ 



Cultivated land (including ' ' per- 

 manent grass ") 75 59 25 ?20to30 



Land under natural or semi- 

 natural plant-communities ...15 to 20 40 70 to 75 ?70to80 



These figures are necessarily of the roughest description. 



1 See " The Woodlands of England,'' by C. E. Moss, W. M. Rankin 

 and A. G. Tansley, New Phytologist, Vol. ix. 1910, pp. 114—118. 



- It is unfortunately quite impossible to say what proportion of the 

 pasture land of Ireland (amounting to more than two-thirds of the whole 

 area) is under approximately natural vegetation, but it is probably very 

 large. 



