Forest Chase Scene

[The Colonel]

Originally Posted by Pursuivant

It's been that way since antiquity. The most fertile land gets cleared or drained to grow crops. Areas that don't lend themselves to agriculture become woodlots or pastures.

That and anything outside about an hour's ox range (~2 miles IIRC) from a village or farmstead - apparently that was about as far as it was reasonably practicable to plough until horsepower was normalised. You also get to adjust for the lay of the land, so steep slopes tend naturally towards being unploughed and the ploughed fields extend more along the valley than up the sides. Of course, if you don't plough and instead terrace and hand tool it, that changes things, but you normally only do that if you are short of flat land to begin with.