"takes a big forest to make everything out of wood?" Topic

all thethe gun carriages wagons ect carriages charts and ect and lot of carpenters

Less of an issue with gun carriages and wagons. The biggest problem was wooden warships.

Britain had pretty much run out of seasoned oak for warships by 1864. The last wooden hulled Ironclad built for the Royal Navy was HMS Lord Clyde, she only lasted in service for 11 years because he timbers were not properly seasoned. Her sistership Lord Warden, built with seasoned wood lasted 24 years.

Good point – by the early 19th century the Brits were importing large amounts of wood from the Baltics and Canada, with the problem for Canadian wood being the long transit time and the potential impact on wood quality

Back around the 1700s, a lot of wood was being cut, collected, and transported from South and Central America too.

ISTR it took a square mile of old oak forest to provide the timbers for HMS Victory.

When I was a kid, I read that Napoleon had a certain type of tree planted along the roads (chestnuts, maybe?) because they made good musket stocks.

I don't remember the source, it may be baloney, but this topic brought it to mind.

It reminds me of the joke –

Q. Why are there so many tree-lined roads in France?
A. So the German army can march in the shade.

trading was beter than having gold in the colonies?

>>by the early 19th century the Brits were importing large amounts of wood from the Baltics and Canada,

And ummm, pillaging it from the colonies… mature NZ Kauri were harvested in the 1000's and taken away complete- they even built express wharves for the purpose in hard to reach areas, i.e. Upper Kaipara (we had no road network- it was 90% coastal traders)…

Well, by the 19th Century, marking trees in upstate New York with the Broad Arrow wasn't working out as well as it was previously. (Note that it had been a regular complaint before the Revolution that British officials were claiming trees which couldn't conceivably be gotten to shipyards, or which forked too soon to be any use if they had.)

I thought carpenter skills, assignment was a position given to several of the artillery and limber crews?

Where from here:
link

If you want to see the effect on the landscape of all this wood use, just look at the New Forest in the south of England. Awful lot of open space there for a forest.

The New Forest (as well as many others in England) was not necessarily a dense woodland. The term 'forest' often referred to its status as a reserve for hunting, not always a source for wood. Special laws applied in these areas and residents were often very limited in what they could take from the land, you could be hanged for taking a deer and lose a hand for a rabbit or even a faggot of wood.

@GildasFacit

Unless you were in Sherwood's wealth re-distribution scheme and wore Lincoln Green that is!

(If yer come to Nottingham and yo get mugged, don't come mitherin' t'me, t'was in'tallus fillums)

Ireland was once 80% wooded. Its now the least forested nation in the EU. English need for ship wood is part of the reason. See
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By the time Ireland was denuded, England had American colonies, and they were used for wood.

Pan, most of Ireland's forests were denuded in the Neolithic or due to the changing climate and the spread of bogs. Much the same happened in parts of England, such as the Pennines.

france and other nations in europ?

I found this page quite interesting.
I thought i knew the answer was poplar trees. Apparently not.
It seems the napoleon thing is either totally made up or only a small part of the story.

link