183 
WOODS AND PLANTATIONS IN GREAT 
BRITAIN. 
The extent of the Woodlands of Great Britain formed, in 1891, the 
subject of a special inquiry by the Board of Agriculture, as the 
attention lately drawn to the question of forestry appeared to justify 
a closer investigation and the adoption of more direct methods of 
inquiry in the matter. The previous occasions when Returns of 
Woods and Plantations w'ere called for were in 1872, in 1880 (with 
an amended publication in 1881), and in 1888. Great difficulties 
were reported as ha^dng been encountered in each of these attempts, 
and the published totals were confessedly defective. 
It is not easy at all times to secure a uniform definition of 
woods or forests ; and areas whereof the surface is grazed, although 
studded more or less closely with trees, may conceivably be dealt 
with either as woodland or as permanent grass or mountain land. 
The parochial Rate Books, moreover, have proved very defective 
guides to the collecting officers on this point. Greater accuracy 
is believed to have been secured in the new inquiry by direct 
personal application to the holders of wooded land, and in many 
instances corrected measurements are now obtainable from the 
Ordnance Survey Maps. But the improvement in the data now 
collected forbids their offering really comparable figures to the 
approximate records hitherto available. 
Were it permissible to contrast the 2,187,000 acres of 1872, or 
the 2,458,000 acres of 1881, or the 2,561,000 acres of 1888, with 
the 2,695,000 acres Avhich are now stated by the Board to represent 
the woodland surface of Great Britain, a large apparent advance 
must be admitted ; but it is obvious this must be set down rather 
to better information and closer measurements than to an actual 
increase of woods. The extent to which the advance is due to 
greater knowledge of the facts, rather than to extensive planting, 
appears by one branch of the inquiry, from which it would seem 
that the “plantations,” strictly so called, — limiting the term to 
cases where the planting has been effected since 1881 — covered less 
than 103,000 acres, whereas a reference to the inquiry of 1880-81 
would make the apparent decennial growth of area 237,000 acres, — 
and this although it is recognised that some of the more recent 
planting has only balanced areas from which the trees have been 
felled in this interval. 
Of the 134,000 acres added by the more accurate figures of the 
new inquiry to the approximate woodland area of Great Britain as 
recorded in 1888, about 96,000 acres occur in England, 7,000 acres 
in Wales, and 31,000 acres in Scotland. It is noteworthy, more- 
over, that two-fifths of the surface planted in the last ten years is 
returned from Scotland alone, while practically half of the 41,000 
acres of new plantations in that country are accounted for by the 
