The forested history of Hooke Park began after the last ice age, when a ‘wildwood’ of birch, pine, hazel, elm, oak, alder and lime trees established across the lowlands of Britain. Most of this was cleared by neolithic communities, who would go on to use locally harvested roundwood to shore up the earthworks of Iron Age hillforts that dot the Dorset landscape. By the Middle Ages, a remaining patch of woodland near Hooke village had been hemmed in to contain a herd of fallow deer, and after the enclosure of the wastes in the late 17th century ownership of that land passed back and forth among the landed gentry. Its areas of coppice offered firewood for people living nearby; Hooke Park would also have provided small amounts of timber for building, with timber sales increasing in the 19th century thanks to the industrial revolution.

Much of Hooke Park’s current woodland was shaped by events of the 20th century. Two years after its trees were felled in 1947 to support post-war rebuilding, the Forestry Commission purchased the site and replanted it for timber. These efforts mainly focused on beech and Norway spruce, interspersed with smaller areas or ‘stands’ of deciduous oak and ash, and evergreen Corsican pine, western red cedar and Douglas fir. Yet little maintenance of these woodlands was undertaken in the years that followed, so by the time the educational project at Hooke Park began in 1982, the forest needed intervention. To this end its first forester, Andrew Poore, developed a series of working plans for the woodland from the early 1980s onwards, which recommended both urgent maintenance and a programme of management that would unfold over decades – setting in motion a progressive approach to forestry that would come to characterise Hooke Park.