Recent increases in plantation forestry are starting to reverse the global decline in forest cover, in some areas of the world. Britain has practiced afforestation, primarily with non-native conifers, for over a century. It is unclear whether these new plantations have the potential to support native forest species. We quantify afforestation across the North York Moors National Park, UK, deriving a chronology of afforestation from historic maps at six time points from 1854 to 2013. We map the location of current wood ant (Formica lugubris) nests and set their distribution in the context of historic forest cover. We use these nest locations and the features of the habitat in which they occur to model the suitability of recently established conifer plantations for wood ants using MaxEnt. We determine whether non-native conifers offer suitable habitat for a forest specialist species, and assess the lag between establishment of conifer plantations and colonisation by wood ants from historic woodland fragments. Forest cover increased by 229% over 160 years and is now dominated by non-native conifer plantations. Our survey data show that current wood ant populations extend hundreds of metres from where forest was in the past, demonstrating geographical population expansions into newly formed forest, comprised of non-native conifer plantations. Both our data and model reveal that the recently planted non-native conifer plantations are a suitable habitat for this forest specialist species. Our model reveals that Formica lugubris has not yet spread through all available suitable habitat due to very poor dispersal ability , displaying a severe lag behind the availability of habitat. Managers should not assume that unoccupied habitat is unsuitable nor should they expect to see immediate colonisation of plantations. Future forest creation should be targeted close to existing forests to facilitate colonisation of forest specialists.