My favorite forest is also reclaimed land. In the picture below, underneath the snow, a rock wall hides going up the hill in a stacked pattern. This piece of evidence that I played on as a child is evidence of the land’s previous natural history. The open spaces with large oaks that have turned into wolf trees at the top show that the hill used to be a farmscape. The rock wall was perhaps from a time making the territory of a farming who would either plant crops or graze cows or sheep. After the farm was abandoned the stages of succession took over changing the grassland to a soft wood pine forest and then the longer living hardwoods took over. In present day the understory is attempting to come back among the wild raspberries, blueberries, and brambles. And, if left untouched the forest will become an old climax hardwood forest. Before the farmscape natural history it is impossible to tell from the surroundings, although one can look at the natural history of New England and presume the harvesting of pines occurred in correlation with The Great Cutover.
