a
few twisted and stunted alders planted along the shelter of a wall, and
degenerated into "scrub." As soon as you descend from the heights,
indeed, the country becomes luxuriantly wooded, as at Glenthorne and
Lynton and Horner Woods; but the great expanse of Exmoor is bare brown
land, covered with short tussocky grass and grey furze. Why, then, was
it called a "forest" in Saxon times? Did "forest" mean also moorland,
wild and unarable land? This opinion has been held by many
authorities, but there is the contrary one put forward, that Exmoor was
at some time a forest, and that all the land from Crowcombe to Combe
Martin was clothed with oak and beech. We know, indeed, that in early
times, certainly, England was much more densely wooded than now; the
rocky foundation on which Exmoor lies is covered with a peaty deposit
which is formed of decayed vegetable substance--the myriad leaves,
perhaps, of many hundred autumns--and near the Chains, which are a
series of dangerous bogs near Dunkery Beacon, stumps and roots of
bog-oak have been pulled out of the ground. This last fact does not
seem to me in any way conclusive, for Exmoor may have had wooded
thickets, without being a forest covering half a county, like the New
Forest.

And, if it were, what causes led to its deforestation? The climate of
Britain was not, we know, more sheltered and temperate in old days than
now, so it seems necessary to suppose human agency to account for so
great a change. There is one theory, ingenious but fantastic, which
asserts that the whole forest was felled to provide timber props for
the mine-workings of Devon and Cornwall. Whether this took place in
Celtic times, when the trade with Phoenicia was at its height, or
subsequently--in which case it is strange there is no historical record
of so remarkable a fact--or whether those prehistoric peoples who built
huge camps and erected mighty monoliths were yet capable of so
stupendous a feat as felling the timber of sixty thousand acres, and
carting it over roadless country, is at least open to question. There
is another theory, that the Romans in their struggle to subdue the
Britons, who took refuge in these wooded fastnesses, fired the forest,
and burned them out, as they are supposed to have done with Hatfield
Moor in Yorkshire, which, now a peaty moor, was 12,000 acres of forest
land until Ostorius, having slain many Britons, drove the remnant into
the forest and destroyed it. An