Britain’s Lost Rainforests: How the UK Once Had Lush Forests – and the Plan to Restore Them

When I was a kid, I thought that rainforests were only located in more exotic parts of the world (I grew up in the UK, which can be called many things, but exotic isn’t one of them!). I associated rainforests with places like Africa, India and even Australia – with huge trees and ferns, and animals like tigers and elephants living in them. It wasn’t till much later that I learned that the UK itself had rainforests – but temperate ones – and that, unfortunately, where they once spread across the land, especially the east coast of the UK (even on the Isle of Man), what was left were just fragments of the grandeur that was, before we came along and pretty much ruined it!Of course, this degradation panned out over a couple of thousand years, speeding up once the Industrial Revolution too hold of the UK (which may not even have been called that at the time) and it is going to take a hundred years to renew them. Where once extended rainforests flourished, land was cleared for growing…