Flipped Friday: Heath

What is it? Writers aspire to describe things in ways that give readers  an Aha! moment  - a new phrase or word that flips our expectations and makes us go, “Yes, that’s exactly what an orange looks, tastes, feels, smells like.” Post pictures, text, video (or whatever) of a person, place, or thing to help us look at it in a new way.

Today: Heath

What is a heath? The definition: a tract of open and uncultivated land; wasteland overgrown with shrubs. (Dictionary.com)

I’ve read about heaths in books all my life, from The Secret Garden to Wuthering Heights. As a Southern California girl, heaths lived only in my imagination. Then I had the chance to go to England and visited an actual heath where our tour group climbed a turnstile, stood in a heath while a light wind blew about, and listened to a man with a lovely accent read Thomas Hardy. And though, I expected the heath to be wild, I suddenly understand the untamed beauty that appealed to so many authors.

All pictures were taken by me.

From The Secret Garden: the Musical – Song “House Upon the Hill”:

MARY: Is it always so ugly here?
MRS. MEDLOCK: It’s the moor. Miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep.
MARY: What is that awful howling sound?
MRS. MEDLOCK: That’s the wind blowing through the bushes they call it wuthering that sound…

From The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Nor it isn’t fields nor mountains, it’s just miles and miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep.

From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte:

Beside the crag the heath was very deep: when I lay down my feet were buried in it; rising high on each side, it left only a narrow space for the night-air to invade.

From Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte:

It was dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirk-yard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry-plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat-mould almost buries it.

From Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy:

Thence she started on foot, basket in hand, to reach the wide upland of heath dividing this district from the low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was the aim and end of her day’s pilgrimage.