If you go down in the woods today, you’re sure of an archaeological surprise…

Woodland covers over 30,000 square kilometres of the UK and has been an important source of timber and food for thousands of years. Each wood is different, with its own unique story. Woodland archaeology can be grouped into two types: ‘archaeology of woodland’, which relates to its management over time, and ‘archaeology in woodland’, which includes features that were there long before the trees were planted.

The archaeology of woodland

Archaeological features visible today that tell us about the history of each woodland include wood banks, coppicing, charcoal burning sites and saw pits.

Each plantation of woodland was often outlined on the ground by a wood bank. A ditch was dug around the wood and the soil piled along inside it, to permanently mark the boundary. Wood banks were made to protect the young trees from damage by grazing animals, including deer. Many medieval and later wood banks survive, sometimes with an ancient or ‘veteran’ tree on top, which reminds us of their great age. Similar banks line ‘lumber roads’, where horses were used to drag large timbers out of the woodland.

Coppicing is a traditional method of cutting down a tree to a stump to encourage new shoots. This keeps the wood quite small, making it ideal for use as poles, firewood and charcoal. Coppiced trees have a distinctive shape and can be centuries old.

Charcoal burning sites can be recognised today as small platforms terraced into hillslopes, or as a pattern of dark smudges on old aerial photographs, where the intense heat damaged the soil and rock below.

Rectangular saw pits are also common in woodland. One person would stand in the hole and one above. Together, they used a saw with a handle at each end to cut felled tree trunks down to planks.

Archaeology in woodland

Woodland can help to preserve and hide archaeological sites from the Bronze Age to the world wars of the 20th Century. Early Bronze Age round barrow burial monuments were created nearly 4,000 years ago, usually in open landscapes so they could be seen easily. These mounds and holes from more recent mines and quarries often make the ground too lumpy to plough so these areas were often planted with trees instead, to provide shelter from winds for the nearby fields and create a home for animals. Sometimes these were deliberate ‘coverts’ for foxes or pheasants to be hunted as sport, which can be spotted by the names like ‘Fox Covert’ on early Ordnance Survey maps.

Welshbury Iron Age hillfort in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, was one of the first places where Aerial Laser Scanning, also known as lidar, was used to create a digital model of the ground surface. This has now become a standard tool in archaeological investigation as it allows us to see and map earthwork banks and ditches through the trees, revealing hundreds of new archaeological sites.

Old patterns of fields, dating from late prehistory through to the medieval period, are often preserved in woodland. Sometimes boundaries were re-used as the edges of the plantations, others were ignored completely. The remains of iron production and pottery manufacture are often located in or close to woodland as they needed a steady supply of wood and charcoal as fuel.

During the Second World War, large areas of woodland like Savernake Forest in Wiltshire were used to store ammunition from the factories before it was sent off to war. The trees provided a natural camouflage, hiding piles of ammunition from enemy spy planes, and would hopefully absorb some of the impact if they did explode.