“Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew.”

Elrond speaking, Council of Elrond

“I had once read somewhere that in King John’s reign a squirrel could travel from the Severn to the Humber without touching ground”

— Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople from the Hook of Holland: The Middle Danube to the Iron Gates by Patrick Leigh Fermor 1986

[Although published in the 1980s, the book records a journey Fermor made in 1934. The book was written after Fermor's notebooks of the trip were unexpectedly returned to him after many years in which he thought they were lost.]

“The idea that Britain's primeval residents were restricted to naturally open areas within an otherwise hostile forest was cemented by Sir Cyril Fox, one of England's foremost archaeologists of the twentieth century, in his 1932 work, The Personality of Britain.

Fox conceived of the extent of Britain's ancient forests in squirrel miles. The story of this apocryphal rodent, crossing vast distances through the treetops without ever touching the ground, has been around for centuries, although I have never been able to uncover the true origins of the phrase. The squirrel has scurried across the skylines of everywhere from the Iberian Peninsula to the Eastern United States. At some point, it made the leap into the axioms of British history, such that, in 1918, the architect Maurice B. Adams could claim that, during the Middle Ages, open country was unknown, and England was so densely wooded that it was said a squirrel could traverse the kingdom without touching the ground. In the conclusion to The Personality of Britain, Fox took a squirrel's-eye view of the landscape at the dawn of the Iron Age, around 2,500 years ago.

The forest at this time ‘was in a sense unbroken, for without emerging from its canopy a squirrel could traverse the country from end to end’, he wrote, echoing the old cliché. But Fox's squirrel would have needed to do some route planning to achieve this feat. His treetop journey would have been punctuated by patches of open land, where he may have observed humans milking cows and tending crops. It was in these forest-free stretches, according to Fox, that the civilisation of Britain truly began.

Nature’s Ghosts, by Sophie Yeo, Harper North 2024

“Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed with the Lord Elrond once, and many things wild and strange we knew.”
Sir Meneldor