Old Forest

The Taur Iaur was a dense woodland lying between the Tyrn Gorthad and the Shire.The Old Forest was a fragment of the vast woodland which had once covered most of Middle-earth. The hearts of many of the forest's trees were black and spiteful towards Men and Hobbits. Some even said that the trees attacked intruders in the forest. Whatever the truth of these stories, many venturing into the Taur laur were never seen again.
While this tainted, malevolent woodlandwais not truely representative of the forests of the Elder Days, the intense sense of "awareness" and magical prescence the traveler feelt there mirrored the nature of ancient tree-communities. In the mid-Second Age, Númenorean sorcerers had contrived to force the Animated Trees of the Eriadoran forests, into a few selected pockets, to eliminate the continuing danger they had presented both to local farmers and herdsmen and to the imperial ambitions of the Numenorean colonists. The Taur Iaur—well to the north of most settlements of Men in Cardolan, and because of that already a haven for Faerie beings fleeing civilization—was one of the two repositories of this campaign. Its success, after decades of effort, left the Old Forest a fell place, filled with pockets of bitterness and hatred for all mortal flesh. Wherever Men or Hobbits settled too near the forest, its trees sensed the incursion and concentrated their hostility in nearby groves. This phenomenon was marked at Buckland, on the eastern border of the Shire. Where the trees were less alert, Men may, if careful and minimally intrusive, entered the forest fringes to hunt, collect firewood, and gather nuts and fruit in the their seasons. Faerie creatures were always present, however, and the Taur Iaur could never be said to be truely safe.
In the last years of the kingdom of Arthedain,the Old Forest became a constant source of grief for the folk along the Brandywine.The continuing presence of "Old Tom"— that was, Tom Bombadil—kept the Witch-king from using the haunted wood as a base for his armies, but Bombadil lacked the means or the inclination to truly cleanse the wood of its hatred for the Free Peoples.Every few years, small and subtle horrors crept across the river into the Shire, and only frequent ax-raids and burnings kept the curse of the forest from troubling the Great Road and the settlements along the river.