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.
