Hatfield Forest

Hatfield Forest in Essex, England, is owned by the National Trust. and is 1,049 acres (4.245 km²) of woodland, wood pasture (grass plains with trees), lake and marsh (strictly fen because it is fresh water). It is in the parish of Hatfield Broad Oak and lies three miles to the east of Bishop’s Stortford and immediately south of Stansted Airport. By car it is just off Junction 8 of the M11 motorway, with the 35 mile drive north east from Central London taking around an hour. It is open to the public.

The Forest is not particularly near, nor related to the town of Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Rather, in common with several other Hatfields, its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word Hoep-Field meaning Heath-field, or heathland in view of the woodland.

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.”