Apart from the towns
and villages and isolated buildings, the railways, roads,
airfields, factory sites, mines and quarries, most of the British lowlands are occupied
by farmlands under arable crops or fields of' permanent' grass, much of which has
been ploughed up during the war. Scattered among these, however, there are
woods, and here and there commons covered with heath and wild grasses, mostly
on land which did not repay cultivation, at least in earlier times, and was used by the '
commoners' for pasture and, where trees and shrubs were present, for the collection
of dead wood. As the result of these uses and of the not infrequent fires the
commons are often considerably altered from their original condition, though they still
bear 'wild' vegetation, including stretches of bracken fern, scrub of gorse and other
shrubs, and sometimes isolated trees. At one time most of this common land, like
that which has long been farmland, was covered with forest, except on the poorest
soils where only heath can flourish.
