I've been reading a lot of history lately. I love how it describes our present. Case in point: for thousands of years, Brittons have imagined a mysterious, forested Britain in the recent past:

[Forests] remind us of an older English past that has become heavily mythologised and distorted — like the knights on the Grail Quest who periodically disappeared and were lost in the trees — and yet depends on the perception that much of England was forested for the greater part of its history. A perception that is wrong... We suffer from what might be called Sherwood Syndrome: the need to believe that much of England — most of England — was both wild and wooded until modern history ‘began’ in 1066 [the year of the Norman Conquest], or indeed stayed so until much later; and that these ancient forests were the repository of ‘a spirit of England’, the Green Man, that could be summoned at times when we needed to be reminded of our national identity; where Robin Hoods of all subsequent generations could escape, where the Druids gathered their mistletoe from the trees, where the oak that built our battleships came from.

Many thousands of years ago, Bronze Age Brittons felled most of the forests of England. By the time the Romans arrived, England was already mostly settled:

Villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.

We can imagine that forest clearing was an incredibly intensive and ambitious project for ancient Brittons, who used tree trunks as monuments and ax heads as currency. But, nonetheless, those people are unknown to us. And yet we keep pulling that ancient mystery into the recent past:

We are forever constructing prelapsarian narratives in which a golden sunlit time — the Pax Romana, the Elizabethan golden age, that Edwardian summer before the First World War, a brief moment in the mid-1960s with the Beatles — prefigure anarchy and decay. Or the cutting down of the forest... Britons are supremely comfortable with that blurring — with a mythic dimension that adds gravitas to our self-understanding, and that imbues the land with a kind of enchantment, a magical aspect that is echoed in our narratives of how we came to be a nation.

To understand who we are today, it's important to remember that a thousand years ago the British were still pining for a simpler time when they could down tools and wander into the mystical forest. Somehow, it seems that we have always tended to be uncomfortable with the idea that our ancient ancestors were as innovative and industrious as ourselves.