How far did the ‘colonising’ rhetoric improvement match the reality on Exmoor in this period? The chapter uses high-resolution palaeoecological sampling and analysis to chart the changes in the abundance of tree, shrub, sedge, grass and other herb species on five sites within the Knight estate—located in both ‘improved’ farmland and open moorland sites. The analysis also models the effects on these distributions of drainage, grazing density and burning (associated with moorland management and ‘improvement’ methods) over the last 500 years. By comparing these distributions before and after the enclosure of the Royal Forest, it illustrates the relatively limited amount of change after 1818. While the effects of widespread drainage were apparent in the samples, enclosure and agrarian failures before 1860 reduced the intensity of use in many areas compared to the Royal Forest, while improved grasslands remained small in extent despite attracting much publicity. Consequently, the nineteenth century was not a period of wholesale change in the palaeoecological record.