As the population increased, more and more wilderness land was cleared for cultivation, or to provide timber for construction and, from Elizabethan times, for shipbuilding.

In Great Britain nowadays, three quarters of the land is used for agricultural or forestry purposes. This is what we call 'the countryside'.

It can vary widely from being vast, ploughed fields where neither man nor beast may roam, to National Park land, used for grazing or forestry.

Sadly, no original wilderness remains.

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Farming in the nineteenth century...
and intensive agriculture today