I don't live in the UK but I was born in Scotland and have been back a few times for visits. Several years ago, I took a long walk from Tobermory to Calgary Bay (on the Isle of Mull) and much of the road went through woods, but it didn't feel like the woods in Nova Scotia where I grew up. I didn't know why until a few days later, when I went for a short walk around Tobermory which went through a very small wood, which was completely different - the smell of decaying wood and the sound of the birds brought back so many memories.

I think the first wood (which was very large) was a tree farm - it had a cultivated, "dead" feel to it. I suspect what made me uneasy was the lack of any birds.

In the days of William the Conqueror (1066 and all that) there were over a dozen "Royal Forests"; by the 1800's only a few of them still existed. The Forest of Dean owes its existence to Admiral Nelson, who was concerned about the elimination of oak trees to build naval vessels and lobbied the British Parliament to turn the Forest of Dean into a nursery for growing oaks. Of course, 60 years later, the ironclad was invented and the need for oak trees to build ships disappeared, but - like any good government sinecure - the mandate to grow oak trees remained on the books. Today, the forest is an ecological display piece, and they are working to restore it to its original form.

But by and large, most of the people in the UK simply don't understand the concept of getting "lost in the woods" because it's virtually impossible to do so. That may have changed; over the last 30 years or so, there has been a movement to try and replant ancient forests that had been cleared for farming and other purposes (often hundreds of years ago). But those efforts are still pretty much in their infancy, I'm pretty sure.