page_title: Neolithic British Isles
section_title: Deforestation
hierarchical_section_title: Neolithic British Isles / Characteristics / Deforestation
caption_attribution_description: House 1 of Skara Brae.
context_page_description: The Neolithic British Isles refers to the period of British, Irish and Manx history that spanned from circa 4000 to circa 2,500 BCE. The final part of the Stone Age in the British Isles, it was a part of the greater Neolithic, or "New Stone Age", across Europe.
  During the preceding Mesolithic period, the inhabitants of the British Isles had been Mesolithic European hunter-gatherers. Around 4000 BCE migrants began arriving from central Europe. Although the earliest indisputably acknowledged languages spoken in the British Isles belonged to the Celtic branch of the Indo-European family it is not known what language these early farming people spoke. These migrants brought new ideas, leading to a radical transformation of society and landscape that has been called the Neolithic Revolution. The Neolithic period in the British Isles was characterised by the adoption of agriculture and sedentary living. To make room for the new farmland, these early agricultural communities undertook mass deforestation across the islands, dramatically and permanently transforming the landscape.
context_section_description: The Neolithic agriculturalists deforested areas of woodland in the British Isles in order to use the cleared land for farming. Notable examples of forest clearance occurred around 5000 BCE in Broome Heath in East Anglia, on the North Yorkshire Moors and also on Dartmoor. Such clearances were performed not only with the use of stone axes, but also through ring barking and burning, with the latter two likely having been more effective. Nonetheless, in many areas the forests had regrown within a few centuries, including at Ballysculion, Ballynagilly, Beaghmore and the Somerset Levels.
  Between 4300 and 3250 BCE, there was a widespread decline in the number of elm trees across Britain, with millions of them disappearing from the archaeological record, and archaeologists have in some cases attributed this to the arrival of Neolithic farmers. For instance, it has been suggested that farmers collected all the elm leaves to use as animal fodder during the winter, and that the trees died after being debarked by domesticated cattle. Nonetheless, as Pearson highlighted, this decline in elm might be due to the elm bark beetle, a parasitic insect that carries with it Dutch elm disease, and evidence for which has been found at West Heath Spa in Hampshire. It is possible that the spread of these beetles was coincidental, although the hypothesis has also been suggested that farmers intentionally spread the beetles so that they destroyed the elm forests, providing more deforested land for farming.
  Meanwhile, during the period from around 3500 to 3300 BCE, many of these deforested areas began to see reforestation and mass tree regrowth, indicating that human activity had retreated from these areas.
caption: The inside of the Neolithic houses constructed on Skara Brae in Orkney, northern Scotland.
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