How big is an acre? – Measuring Your Woodland
People who have not owned forestry or agricultural land can often find it hard to visualise what an acre looks like. This is an attempt to help you visualise how big an area one acre is.
An acre measures an area of land and is about 70 yards by 70 yards, which means about 4,900 square yards (or roughly 44,000 square feet).
A typical football pitch is about 110 yards by about 70 yards (the rules allow some flexibility in the size) so that a pitch covers about one and a half acres of field or, including the immediately surrounding land that goes with it, the football pitch takes up about 2 acres.
Another way to visualise one acre is as the area in which you could park about 150 cars. A typical supermarket, excluding the car park, covers about 0.6 of an acre (about 26,000 square feet).
A 9 acre woodland might be only equivalent to about 6 football pitches, but it will usually appear bigger than that for various reasons: you can’t see across it and a wood will have bumps and dips and other features, but the main thing is that a forest is three-dimensional. The trees give the extra dimension which makes a woodland so much more interesting and so much richer in biodiversity, and make it seem much bigger.
The other measurement often used for surface area is the metric measure - hectares. A hectare is precisely 100 metres by 100 metres and is much larger than an acre. About 2.47 acres make up one hectare, so an acre is only about 40% of the size of a hectare. One reason that acres, rather than hectares, are used in the UK is that, being a smaller measure, you get more of them in a given piece of land and it is easier to remember a round number of acres than a hectare measurement with a decimal point. However, one advantage of using hectares is that more detailed maps use grid lines where the distance between the lines is equivalent to 100 metres. The result of this is that each square covers exactly one hectare or approximately two and a half acres.
If you are trying to measure in approximate terms an acre of woodland you can pace it out as about 80 paces by 80 paces, though in woodlands people often take shorter paces so 70 yards may take more like 90 paces.
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Discussion
Have you had a look at the front page of the website?
or
http://www.woodlands.co.uk/buying-a-wood/mid-wales-and-shropshire/
Hope that helps.
Can anyone help me? Looking for a small woodland Welsh borders area
Thanks! I’m a student, forever asking farmers “how many acres the animals are grazing” without having any idea how big that is! Now it seems so simple!
I’ve been looking for something this simple for ages on the net. thanks very much!
Thanks but i can’t figure out how big an eigth of an acre is….
can you tell me if i can buy up some arable approx 30 acres
land and turn that land into a forest.
with small lake
Hi
any one help me find some woods near teeside area
or near north with pond or lake(2,3 acres)
Thanks I have to quote for 20 acres of woodland and I couldn’t visualise the size.
thanks so much for the simple xplanation.it’s unbelievable that five years as a survey student,i am just getting to knw and understand what an acre mean
Traci: start at the edge, but stride backwards as a normal forward stride will be too long.
ok but 70 paces from where? i mean how do you know where to start?
Thanks for this, now I can go and pace out my one hectare for my kins domain.
Thanks, hope to buy approx. 6 acres and needed to get some idea of size.
Thanks iv just strided my pad out & its 90yds x 40ydy 3600sq yds just trying 2 work out how many houses i can fit in the garden cos times r hard & im getting fed up with mowing harlf an acre.
Thank you i needed to find out something about the rainforest inacres and now i can
That’s brilliant, I can now work out how big the horses fields are by just looking at them.
Excellent explanation, much better than the algebra way!!
It’s taken me 51 years to find out how big an acre is! Brilliantly and simply explained. I’m off to pace out the bit of land at the back of my house.
thanks now i no how big my land is going to be
LOL :-)
I must have a special gift!
So, Ron, using Angus’s’s’s maths, that makes your garden smaller than a supermarket carpark.
Glad to help! ;-)
Does someone out there know me?
My last house had a large garden and I did actually have 24 cv’s in it.[Citroens}
Well Ron, how many cars can you park in your garden? ;-)
I think that helps Angus! I certainly know that an 8 acre wood feels plenty big enough when you are looking after it!
Glad someone cleared that up, thanks.
Thanks, it puts things in prospective.
Now how big is my garden?
I am 11 and I was doing a rainforest subject and I needed to find how many yards an acre was, and I did! This site is really helpful. Thank you!
(By the way I got a merit for my subject)
Libby
27 June, 2010