always require special treatment and therefore they have been left
alone. In days of old our ancestors disliked them very much;
"villanous, rascally heaths" Cobbett always called them. There were
practically no villages and few cottages, because the land was too
barren to produce enough food; the few dwellers on the heath, or the
"heathen," were so ignorant and benighted that the name came to stand
generally for all such people and has remained in our language long
after its original meaning was lost. As there were so few inhabitants
the heaths used to be great places for robbers, highwaymen, and
evil-doers generally; Gad's Hill on the Watling St. between Rochester
and Gravesend, Finchley Common, Hounslow Heath and others equally
dreaded by travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were
barren sandy tracts. But in our time we no longer need to dread them;
we can enjoy the infinite charm of the breezy, open country with its
brown vegetation, the pink blossom of the bell-shaped heath and the
lilac blossom of the {106} heather, the splashes of yellow from the
ragwort or the gorse and the dark pine and larch plantations. In the
spring the young shoots of bracken lend a beautiful light green colour
to the scene, while in the autumn the faded growth covers it all with a
rich brown. People now like to live amid such surroundings, and so
these heaths, that have been untouched for so long and are part of the
original primeval England as it was in the days of the Britons, are
becoming dotted with red bricked and red tiled villas, and are fast
losing their ancient character. The heaths are not everywhere dry;
there are numerous clay basins where the sand lies wet, where peat
forms (see p. 37), and where marsh plants like the bog asphodel,
sundew, or cotton grass can be found. In walking over a heath you soon
learn to find these wet places by the colour of the grass and the
absence of heather. In some places there is a good deal of wood,
especially pines, larches, and silver birches: all these are very
common on the Surrey sands, willows also grow in the damp places. Fig.
48 shows a Surrey heath--Blackheath--with heather, gorse and bracken;
with pine-woods in the distance and everywhere some bare patches of
sand. Much of the New Forest is on the sand, as also is Bournemouth,
famous for its fine pine woods. Fig. 49 is a view of such woods on
Wimbledon common. But elsewhere there is no wood: the peasants bu