Hatfield Forest
| Site of Special Scientific Interest | |
 |
|
| Area of Search | Essex |
|---|---|
| Grid reference | TL 538202 |
| Interest | Biological |
| Area | 403.2 hectares |
| Notification | 1985 |
| Location map | Magic Map |
Hatfield Forest is a 403.2 hectare biological Site of Special Scientific Interest in Essex, three miles east of Bishop's Stortford. It is also a National Nature Reserve and a Nature Conservation Review site. It is owned and managed by the National Trust. A medieval warren in the forest is a Scheduled Monument.
Hatfield is the only remaining intact Royal Hunting Forest and dates from the time of the Norman kings. Other parts of the once extensive Forest of Essex include Epping Forest to the southwest, Hainault Forest to the south and Writtle Forest to the east. Hatfield Forest was established as a Royal hunting forest in the late eleventh century, following the introduction of fallow deer and Forest Laws were imposed on areas by the king. Deer hunting and chasing was a popular sport for Norman kings and lords and strictly the word ‘forest’ means place of deer rather than of trees. In the case of Hatfield the area of Forest Law consisted of woodlands with plains.
Oliver Rackham, the botanist and expert on the countryside, in his book about the Forest entitled The Last Forest (Dent Books 1976) argues that: “Hatfield is of supreme interest in that all the elements of a medieval Forest survive: deer, cattle, coppice woods, pollards, scrub, timber trees, grassland and fen .... As such it is almost certainly unique in England and possibly in the world …….The Forest owes very little to the last 250 years ….. Hatfield is the only place where one can step back into the Middle Ages to see, with only a small effort of the imagination, what a Forest looked like in use.”
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