WE have been at war with our forests for at least 5,000 years, and this week’s attempt to privatise them is just the latest skirmish.

We’ve burned them for warmth, we have cut them down to build shelters, we have cleared them so that our sheep may safely graze – “ley” at the end place names from Stokesley to Hamsterley indicates that the settlement was originally in a clearing.

The Vikings raided to steal our timber to make their longships; then our cathedral and castle builders plundered our forests for scaffolding and roofing materials – an averagesized cathedral used 2,500 centuries-old oaks, enough to cover at least 80 football pitches.

Then we went to war, against the Scots, the French, the Americans et al – all on the back of timber. At Agincourt in 1415, our super supple yew trees provided us with longbows, the decisive weapon. In Henry VIII’s time, an average-sized warship such as the Mary Rose was fashioned out of 1,200 proud oaks.

Industry came, fuelled first by wood. When we discovered the power of coal hidden deep beneath Durham’s rolling hills, our forests were saved from incineration but were still cut down to act as pit-props and railway sleepers.

In 3000BC, 60 per cent of Britain had been covered by trees. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, only four per cent – an alltime low – was covered.

To encourage afforestation, in 1758, the newly-founded Royal Society of Arts offered awards for people who planted trees for “the supply of the Navy, the employment and advantage of the poor as well as ornamenting the nation”. During the next 75 years, 50 million trees were planted, and many of today’s forests date back to this time and those three noble aims.

For example, in the early 19th Century, the banking Backhouse family of Darlington and Sunderland began buying Weardale’s open moorland and poor quality grassland. They dug ditches to drain it and began planting.

In 1813, brothers Jonathan and William won silver and gold Royal Society medals for planting 271,000 larches at Dryderdale and 420,000 timber trees at St John’s above Wolsingham.

The following year, their younger brother Edward won a gold for planting 350,000 trees at Dryderdale.

Their motivation is difficult to divine because as Quaker pacifists, they can’t have planted to support the Navy.

Perhaps as businessmen with excess cash – Edward was the only banker in Sunderland for a decade during which he made so much money that he, and his sons, were set for life – they saw it as an investment.

Perhaps they were driven by their love of nature – William was a nationally renowned moss expert who had the only mulberry tree in Darlington and married the daughter of a mollusc specialist.

Or perhaps they simply wanted to ornament the nation.

From their acorns, Hamsterley forest grew (incidentally, its name does not come from a wheel-spinning rodent, but a hamstra, an Old English corn weevil that infested the area).

But the First World War, when the trenches of the Somme were propped up by trunks, so depleted Britain’s woodlands that the Forestry Commission was created in 1919.

Then in the Second, the “lumberjills” of the Women’s Timber Corps tore at the trees.

Today, though, Britain’s forests have recovered to cover 12 per cent of the country and it is to be hoped that, whatever the Government does, they will continue to ornament the nation.