Hardwood extraction and thinning in South Oakley enclosure (1853); the nearly 170 year old beech and oak trees are cropped, trimmed, graded, stacked or laid out. Really a large part of the New Forest is a tree farm, and has been for hundreds of years (that's what the enclosures are all about); South Oakley here was created on a landscape of open heath and scattered clumps of ancient unenclosed woodland, the remnants of which are represented by scattered ancient pollarded trees; pollarding was banned 1698 to ensure timber for the Navy; admiralty arrows are the most common mark/graffiti found on forest trees. I like the foresight of planting a crop not to be harvested for generations; that's belief in humanities persistence that is.
