Robin hood legend of sherwood bugged lincoln battle

Now the furthest he could ride without breaking cover would be three miles, through a landscape carved up by towns and villages, agriculture, roads and coal mining. Maps traced by archaeologist Ursula Spence show that if there ever was a Robin Hood, living at the time of the Crusades, he could have escaped from the back door of Nottingham castle into the forest and ridden under trees as far as Sheffield. 'We have been raided for centuries for buildings all over the country, including Lincoln cathedral and St Paul's. 'This is the beating heart of the forest,' he said, standing by a 600-year-old giant believed to hold the oldest colony of wild bees in the country. That won't show for another century - but then people will look back and see that we failed to save it.'

'But if we don't do it in the next decade or so we might well go past the point where we can claw the forest back. 'People might say, having waited three centuries what's the rush?' Austin Brady, a conservator with the Forestry Commission, and coordinator of the lottery bid, said.

'We had our eye on it, and we were planning a bit of gentle intervention, but nature got there first.'ДЄ rescue plan, for which a ВЈ50m bid will be made this winter from the Big Lottery Fund, includes planting 250,000 oaks on 350 acres, linking the surviving fragments and creating new stretches of the equally important grazed open heath. To be honest, I cried over that one,' Izi Banton, the chief ranger, said. But this year alone four fell in the January storms, two were destroyed by arson, and on August 13, with a splintering crash that sent passersby running, another toppled without warning. The great oaks came almost unscathed through the hurricane that 20 years ago today felled millions of trees in the south. Yesterday, in still hazy autumn sunshine, the forest seemed magically unchanged since time immemorial, but that is an illusion.

Robin hood legend of sherwood bugged lincoln battle