Forgotten Forests: Twelve Thousand Years of British and Irish Woodlands

Ancient trees, some over a thousand years old, are dotted around the British Isles, the last survivors of a lost world. Now, new scientific studies of these trees and of fossilised forests and of our oldest wooden artifacts can help us to understand the many woodlands that have disappeared from our landscapes.

Locked in ice for more than twenty thousand years, the lands that now make up Britain and Ireland were some of the last settled by humans. The earliest people, Mesolithic hunter-gather...