People looking for a place in the country are giving up on the search for a second home and buying pieces of woodland instead.

Getting back to nature in so called 'hobby woods' is becoming increasingly popular as conservation minded investors in search of the rural idyll turn their backs on property.

One company that has decided to make the most of the trend is Woodlands Investment Management, which sells small woods between ten and 40 acres.

The company's sales have doubled over the last three years, to about one wood a week.

In Sussex, it has recently sold one 11-acre wood at Burwash Common, near Heathfield, and another wood near Hailsham.

It has other woods near Rotherfield and Petworth coming onto its books soon.

Anybody who buys Dawn Wood, at Bodiam, near Robertsbridge, which is the only Sussex wood being marketed at the moment, will get 12 acres of chestnut coppiced woodland, a few oaks and a wild service tree.

All of it is inside the High Weald area of outstanding natural beauty and the buyer will have to agree the same management plan being operated in surrounding woods.

Woodlands Investment Management owner Angus Hanton said people were attracted to woodland because it offered them somewhere to camp and spend weekends at a fraction of the cost of buying a holiday cottage.

He said: "A lot of people are thinking that they would like a place in the country but not necessarily a cottage in the country.

"A lot of people want to own woods so that on a weekend after work when they are exhausted they can go and chill out, slow down and get back to nature."

About half of Britain's woodland is made up of small plots of 25 acres or less.

Mr Hanton's company sells small woods or buys larger areas of woodland and splits them up into smaller more manageable plots for hobby buyers.

Woodland is still cheap compared to most other land, especially land earmarked for house building and other development.

But buyers have to share Mr Hanton's conservation principles, anybody who is buying with an eye to selling it for development is steered away.

And all are told the most likely thing they will ever be able to do with their purchase is leave things pretty much the way they are.

At the moment hobby woods are typically selling for £2,000 to £3,000 an acre, making it a preserve of the wealthy.

The only, quite attractive, tax advantage is that woods do not qualify for inheritance tax once they have been owned for more than two years.

There are some grants available from the Forestry Commission for management and special work, and from English Nature if the wood is designated a site of special scientific interest, but otherwise it is not a money spinner.

The days when small woods made money are long gone, according to Mr Hanton's company, and hobby woods are only useful as a place to visit and conserve.

Owning hobby woods runs in Mr Hanton's family. His mother Margaret has been a dedicated weekend woodlander for 25 years and visits her wood, near Heathfield, at least once a fortnight during the summer.

When the wood was bought there were disagreements about what new tress to plant - she wanted indigenous broad-leaved tress, her husband wanted conifers.

She said: "We ended up with a wood that has everything. We have oaks and beech by the stream and we had a lot of conifers until the hurricane.

"We have probably planted over 1,000 beech trees and oaks and things like that. But the big work every year is keeping the paths and things clear so flowers can grow.

"It is wonderful, it is the delight of my life. We have a big shed where we keep the kit and if we stay there we camp.

"All the cooking is done on a barbeque and all the washing up done on a table outdoors."

There is a clearing in the centre of the wood where Mrs Hanton and her grown up children and their children camp. On summer weekends there are often groups of 15 people camped out in the woods.

Mrs Hanton said: "I think it is catching on. I think people are getting much more interested in ecology and preserving the good things about the environment. They get really keen about having a bit of wild country they can call their own.

"Also I think if people want to camp they can camp in their own wood where they get a bit of privacy, even if the toilets are rather primitive."