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Updated: June 8, 2025
The heath is almost hidden, in places, by the large white flowers and trailing stems of the sage-leaved Cistus. Delicate purple Ixias, and yet more delicate Hoop-petticoat Narcissus, spring from the turf. And here and there among furze and heath, crop out great pink bunches of the Daphne Cneorum of our gardens, perfuming all the air.
After continuous showers in spring, lizards are often found in the adjacent gardens, their dark backs as they crawl over the patches being almost exactly the tint of the moist earth. If touched, the tail is immediately coiled, the body stiffens, and the creature appears dead. They are popularly supposed to come from the furze, which is also believed to shelter adders.
They are woven with great delicacy, and attached to some twig, or hanging leaf, by means of spider's webs. They are lined with a soft silky cotton fibre; and composed, externally, of a woolly kind of furze, bound together with which appears also to be spider's web. One of the largest is the Eupetomena macroura, with a swallow tail, and a livery of brilliant emerald-green and steel blue.
This place, which has been since made into a small harbour, surrounded by many villas and lodging-houses, is now termed Portobello. At this time it was surrounded by a waste common, covered with furze, and unfrequented, save by fishing-boats, and now and then a smuggling lugger.
Two acres of furze he had, which he cut close in alternate years, the second year's growth making a fine juicy fodder when chopped small into a sort of chaff. An old hand-apparatus for that purpose a kind of chaff-cutting box was described to me. The same man had a horse, which also did well on furze diet mixed with a little malt from the man's own beer-brewing.
Beyond lie the pale glinting levels of the estuary, guarded on the west by gently upward sloping cornlands and on the south by the dark furze and heath-clad mass of Stone Horse Head. Beyond again, to the low horizon, stretches the Channel sea. The very simplicity of the picture gives it singular dignity and repose.
A deep lane leads abruptly down the hill; a mere narrow cart-track, sinking between high banks clothed with fern and furze and low broom, crowned with luxuriant hedgerows, and famous for their summer smell of thyme.
There is not, perhaps, another home-made implement of old English agriculture left in use; certainly, none at once so curious and interesting, and, when drawn by oxen, so thoroughly characteristic. Under the September sun, flowers may still be found in sheltered places, as at the side of furze, on the highest of the Downs.
Just and the sea a sort of common, covered with heath and furze on which the ancient Britons have left their indelible mark, in the shape of pits and hollows and trenches, with their relative mounds and hillocks.
But he could not rest there, nor in the osier bed, nor in the furze, but he kept moving from place to place all day, contrary to his custom, and not without running great danger. The sting lingered in him, and the more so because he felt that it was true he knew himself that he had not shown any ability lately. Slowly the long day passed, the shadows lengthened and it became night.
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