The Forest has a long history. Whatever may have happened before the Romans came, they occupied Dean in force, and worked its iron mines. Their coins are found associated with the gigantic excavations where the iron ore has been removed, locally called scowles, and with piles of cinders on the sites of ancient smelting works and forges. Portions of paved roads, some at least formed by them, are still to be seen; and there are remains of villas as well as the Lydney Temple.

The Forest of Dean was one of the smaller coalfields in the British Isles and lay under a covering of woodland making the collieries and small coal working in the area some of the most picturesque in the country. The Forest of Dean also has its own unique mining traditions with the rights to win the coal vested in a group of men known as 'Free Miners'.

The Free Miners now are men born within the hundred of St. Briavels, who have worked underground for a year and a day; and their chief right consists in the power to demand of the Royal gaveller (i.e. toller), who has the control of the mineral property in the Forest, a "gale". This is in effect authority to sink a mine, the miner having a right to choose the spot, provided it does not interfere with any other works.

  From the Roman era to the present mining in Dean has never ceased, and there is good reason to regard the existing Free Miners as largely the descendants of its ancient inhabitants.

  Practically nothing is known of the Forest during Saxon times, but the remains of earthworks, chiefly on the high ground overlooking the Wye, and culminating in the strong defences of Symonds Yat, show that it was the scene of some hard if unrecorded fighting; and it comprises the southern portion of the great boundary of Offa's Dyke, still traceable above the Wye.

William the Conqueror requisitioned the Forest as a royal hunting ground. The oak woods to be found in the Redding Inclosure date back to around that time.

It was not until the early 1800s that exploitation of the coal took place to any great degree and from the 1830s onwards a number of large collieries developed for the extraction of housecoal from the upper coal measures. These were mainly in the Cinderford area and the town expanded as a result of the growth of these collieries.

 After 1904 several collieries were commenced to win coal from the deeper coal seams and it was two of these that survived until 1965 when the last deep mines in Dean closed down. Coal extraction still continues in the Forest with several Free Mines echoing the past and going back to the traditions of the 1700s.

One of the larger Free Mines, Hopewell Colliery, is open today as a museum where visitors may take a trip underground.