Purely by coincidence (if there is such a thing), only tonight, in a book nothing to do with this subject, I came across the following, talking about the botanist Oliver Rackham and his use of the term wildwood (after Grahame's Wild Wood in Wind in the Willows)

"circa 1972, Rackham and other investigators were using pollen analysis and archaeological data to displace the chronology [of the wild wood]:
Roman and Saxon Britain were both cleared landscapes. Woods coppiced for firewood and building poles stood among open fields. The wildwood had arrived at the close of the last Ice Age, reached its climax state about 4000 BC and began to be whittled back as soon as the Mesolithic discovery of agriculture reached Britian. By 2000 BC there were big open spaces on the chalk uplands, by 500 BC half the wildwood had gone..The significance of these dates is that they put the death of the British wildwood before recorded memory... ... We tell no stories of the great wood from memory in England."
From THe Child that Books Built, by Francis Stufford. Its a memory of all the books he read as a kid, and the effect they had on him, and he starts off with the significance of the forest.