A family quietly removed their sheep from a Cornwall hillside, and the effects were immediate. Native trees and ferns began regrowing on land that had been grazed bare.
Temperate rainforest once covered a significant portion of the British Isles, but centuries of clearance for timber, agriculture, and development have reduced it to less than one percent of its former extent. For decades, this habitat loss received little formal attention. A private restoration project on a farm in Cornwall, begun in 2019, provided a working demonstration of how the ecosystem coul…
Britain’s temperate rainforest once spanned a fifth of the country, but after 800 years of felling, grazing, and toxic air, less than 1% remains. Then, in 2020, researcher Guy Shrubsole discovered moss-draped oak gorges that no map had ever catalogued, sparking the first national recovery strategies.
Britain once supported a temperate rainforest covering roughly a fifth of its land surface. This woodland, an estimated 4.6 million hectares, stretched from Cornwall to the Scottish Highlands along west-facing slopes and river gorges. The climate there, mild with heavy Atlantic rainfall, allowed oaks, mosses, lichens, and ferns to grow in dense, interconnected layers. Today, less than 1% of Britai…