Hatfield Forest is a formal Royal Hunting Forest in Essex dating back to the Normans.
Olvier Rackham said 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.It also has a lake although I am not sure the lake is as diverse as it once was. It also happens to be my closest National Trust property and a nice place to walk.
Here are a few pictures
