Heath
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an open, uncultivated, usually desolate tract, covered at best with small shrubs and scanty pasturage. The term is in common use in Great Britain ; the corresponding word for a grove or copsewood is holt. The characteristic shrub of a Scottish heath is the common heather or ling, which gives its name to the heath family known to botanists. It is akin to our blueberries. Heather grows knee or even shoulder high to a man. Cattle browse on the young shoots. Toward the end of August its spikes of bloom give the dry hillsides and the bogs of Scotland a beautiful lilacrose color. For heath-bell with her purple bloom Supplied the bonnets and the plume. The flowers are fragrant and yield an abundance of honey. At this season, bee keepers transport their hives to the hills that the bees may gather honey at short range. Heath is used also in place of straw to thatch huts. Laid in close order with the tips outward, shingle fashion, ling makes a fragrant bed like that made by the American tenter from spruce boughs. Other plants of the heath family cover immense tracts in the Mediterranean region, South Africa, Siberia, Australia, and North America . In addition to the name of the plant just described, a large number of words have been coined from heath. First of all, heathen are those who lived far out in the wild heaths remote from church and school, hence pagans. Heather-bells are the delicate pendent flowers of two plants closely related to heath and growing in similar localities. Heath-cock, heath-hen, heath-bird and heath-fowl all refer to the black-cock or moorfowl, corresponding to our prairie chicken. The terms heath and heather are used also as descriptive of a number of small birds, as the heather-lintie, or linnet, the heather-peeper or sandpiper, and the heath throstle or ring ouzel. See Broom ; Gorse
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910, heath was simply "an open, uncultivated, usually desolate tract" — waste ground. Ecologists now regard lowland heath as a man-made habitat, created by prehistoric clearance and kept open by grazing, burning and cutting; left alone it reverts to birch and pine scrub, so it is deliberately managed rather than merely endured. It has also become scarce: Britain has lost the great majority of its lowland heath since 1800 to forestry, farming and building, and surviving tracts are protected as SSSIs and under European habitat law. The old folk etymology deriving "heathen" from dwellers on remote heaths is not accepted; the word is generally taken as an early Germanic rendering of Latin paganus. The practical details — heather honey, hives carried to the hills in August, ling used for thatch and bedding — still hold, and Calluna's kinship with the blueberries has been confirmed by molecular studies.
Written for this edition, 2026.