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Updated: May 15, 2025
It is a curious fact that the agricultural children, with every advantage of green fields and wide open downs, always choose the dusty hard road to play in. They are free to wander as they list over mead and leaze, and pluck the flowers out of the hedges, and idle by the brooks, all the year round, the latter part of the spring, when the grass is nearly fit for mowing, only excepted.
Names like Pitchwells, where there is a spring; Breakfast Bush Ground, where no doubt Hodge has had his breakfast for centuries under shelter of a certain bush; Rickbushes, and Longlands are all more or less easy to trace. Furzey Leaze, Furzey Ground, Moor Hill, Ridged Lands, and the Pikes are all names connected with the nature of the fields or their locality.
Dark hedges, dark trees in the distance they look almost black nearer at hand the smallest branches devoid of leaves are clearly defined against the sky. As the northerly wind drifts the clouds before it the sun shines down, and the dead, dry grass and the innumerable tufts of the 'leaze' which the cattle have not eaten, take a dull grey hue.
They could not agree either as to the kinship or the date; though the visitor was the more certain because he so well remembered that there was an extraordinary cut of 'turvin' that year. The 'turvin' is the hay made on the leaze, not the meadows, out of the rough grass and bennets left by the cows.
One of the rails of willow was eaten out into hollow cavities by the wasps, which came to it generation after generation for the materials of their nests. The particles they detach are formed into a kind of paste or paper: in time they will quite honeycomb a pole. The third side of the pond shelved to the 'leaze, that the cattle might drink.
Leaze is the provincial name for a pasture, and Furzey Leaze would be a rough "ground," where gorse was sprinkled about. The Pikes would be a field abutting on an old turnpike gate. The word "turnpike" is never used in Gloucestershire; it is always "the pike." A field is a "ground," and a fence or stone wall is a "mound."
At present there were no houses near; the place, whatever it was, had disappeared. The mention of this meadow led to some conversation about the names of the fields, which are often very curious. Such names as Lea, Leaze, Croft, and so on, are readily explained; but what was the original meaning of The Cossicles?
The pellets cut a round hole through an inch and a half of ice. The jack now basking in the pond was the more tempting because we had often tried to wire him in vain. The difficulty was to get him if hit. While I was deliberating a crow came flying low down the leaze, and alighted by the pond. His object, no doubt, was a mussel.
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