ENGLAND’S BARE HILLS.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 17 September 1925, Page 9

ENGLAND’S BARE HILLS.

WHY FORESTS ARE SO FEW

EFFECT OF THE IRON TRADE

' Foreigners who have passed through England often remark upon our proverty of forests; hut this is not because Nature has been niggardly. On the contrary she gave us forests in generous measure. It was the hand of man which destroyed them in the early days of our iron trade (says a writer jn John o’ London’s Weekly). In those days iron was smelted with charcoal. Three loads of charcoal, which were prepared , from six loads of wood, were consumed in the production of one ton of iron bars. The iroii trade, therefore, flourished in those parts which were thickly wooded. Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Monmouth, and the Forest of Dean were our principal iron fields at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The number ol iron .works was then estimated at eight hundred. The Hand of Iron. Charcoal iron inahaihcture was at the height of its prosperity in the seventeenth century. Its centre .of activity was Sussex, of which an old writer says: “Full of iron mines it is in sundry places, where, for the making and founding thereof, there be furnaces on every. side, and a huge deal of wood is yearly burnt.’’ About the middle of the century the iron trade had so expanded that our forests were destroyed with extinction. Writing in 1677, Henry Powle says that the Forest of Dean was then afforests were threatened with extinction, of iron works. The writers of the time expressed the gravest concern. For not only did they regard the forests as things of beauty, but they regarded them as essential to maintamino- jth/6 'aec-uxity, because 'they provided the timber with which the ships of the Royal Navy were built. To arrest the depletion of the forests several statutes were passed restraining the building of furnaces; and attempts were made to encourage the growth of woods. But the depletion continued. As the supply oi wood diminished, the iron trade ‘ oi Sussex, Kent, and Surrey gradually flickered out.

By the end of the- seventeenth century- our forests were in such a state of exhaustion that the iron trade, to some extent, migrated to Ireland, which was still rich in forests, it it recorded in 1702 that Ireland had become an iron exporting country. As a result, the forests of Ireland suflered the same fate as those of England. It was written ; “Ireland was better stored with oak timber than England: but several gentlemen . ■ . set up iro n ' works, which, in a few years, swept away the wood.’’ So acute did our poverty of wood become that in the middle of the eighteenth century our production oi iron sank to one-tenth its former amount. But, fortunately, the use oi wood 'in rthe smelting of iron was shortly to cease. Abraham Darby, at Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, revived the long-neglected method of smelting iron with coal. In 1756 lie was producing twenty tons of coal-smelted iron per week at a profit. Henceforth this method of iron manufacture carried all before it. But the destruction of our forests wrought by the earlier method has never been effectively repaired.