A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
heath
A heath is open ground on poor acid sandy soil, carrying low shrubs, especially heather and gorse, with scattered birch and pine and very few trees otherwise. Heaths are not natural in the sense of being untouched. Most of them are cleared woodland kept open for thousands of years by grazing, cutting, and burning, and left alone they revert to scrub and then to wood.
Etymology
The word is Old English and is a close relative of German heide. Its most interesting descendant is heathen, which appears to have started as a word for someone living out on the heath, beyond the settlements and beyond the reach of the church, and then hardened into a religious term. The same idea produced pagan, which is Latin for a country-dweller.