Qualla: Epping Forest

Epping Forest: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aarandir at en.wikipedia, Public domain. Six thousand years ago, hunters in Neolithic England walked through these trees. The forest has been continuously wooded ever since. In the late nineteenth century landowners were eating it from every side - 3,000 acres enclosed in the early 1800s, more swallowed up year on year, and the same fate threatening that had finished off the neighbouring Hainault Forest in 1851. By 1870 only 3,500 acres remained. Then a Loughton commoner named Thomas Willingale refused to stop lopping his trees, the City of London Corporation took up the cause, and what is now Epping Forest - 2,400 hectares of ancient woodland and grassland straddling the border of Essex and Greater London - was saved.

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Image: Aarandir at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Epping Forest: Six Thousand Years of Trees

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mx. Granger, CC0. Epping Forest has been continuously wooded since Neolithic times. Pollen profiles taken from peat bogs in and around the forest show that even the Iron Age occupation - whose embankments survive at Loughton Camp and Ambresbury Banks, both visible if you know where to look - had n...

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Image: Mx. Granger | CC0

Epping Forest: Thomas Willingale and the Right to Lop

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sunil060902, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1870 the unenclosed forest had shrunk to 3,500 acres. One landowner, Reverend John Whitaker Maitland, had enclosed 1,100 acres in his manor of Loughton. A local commoner called Thomas Willingale insisted on his ancient right to lop trees in the forest for firewood, despite inc...

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Image: Sunil060902 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Epping Forest: The Pollards That Were Never Cut

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jynto (talk), Public domain. Epping Forest contains 55,000 ancient trees, more than any other single site in the United Kingdom. Many of them are pollards - trees that were cut back to a permanent base, the bolling, every thirteen years or so, just above the height where deer and cattle could browse the new ...

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Image: Jynto (talk) | Public domain

Epping Forest: Painters, Poets, and a Plague Year

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Gerard, CC BY-SA 3.0. Epping Forest has been the setting for an unusually wide cast of writers, painters, and musicians. Elizabethan poets George Gascoigne and Thomas Lodge lived in and around it. Lady Mary Wroth, the seventeenth-century poet and prose romancer, lived at Loughton Hall. Ben Jonson was ...

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Image: David Gerard | CC BY-SA 3.0

Epping Forest: The Forest at the Edge of the City

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0. The forest runs roughly nineteen kilometres north to south, but is never more than four kilometres wide. The main body stretches from Epping in the north to Chingford on the edge of the London built-up area. South of Chingford it narrows to a green corridor that pushes deep into ...

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Image: Chris Heaton | CC BY-SA 2.0