Despite the commercial importance of timber in the early modern period, the woodland on Box Hill was much less extensive at the start of the 19th century than at the start of the 21st. The 1801 Betchworth Estate Map shows that there was a network of irregularly shaped fields on the top of the hill, where the more fertile clay-with-flints overlays the chalk. These ‘clearings’ (each up to ) were cultivated for arable crops, but by the 1830s changes in farming practices meant that they were too small to be worked economically and many were over-planted with beech (with some oak). These deciduous plantations may be distinguished from older yew- and box-dominated woodland on the hill by the uniform age of the trees.