LING — continued. 
surface from complete glabrousness to being fringed with hairs, pubescent or hoary. 
Though a bright green at first, they soon become dark, and wither to a dark or rusty 
brown. They give to Scotland the name of the “land of brown heath ” and afford 
food and concealment to the mountain hare and to various species of grouse. To 
encourage the young growth, the Highland grouse-moors are now systematically 
burned by rotation of areas every ten or fifteen years ; but an Act of Parliament of 
the reign of William and Mary forbade this burning of Grigg , , as it was called, 
between Candlemas and Midsummer, under pain of whipping and imprisonment. 
From June in the south to August in the north the flowers open, each little 
short-stalked bell having two leafy and two more membranous bracts below the rose, 
lilac, or rarely white calyx. The deep division of the four acute sepals, and of the 
shorter corolla within, renders the copious honey much more easily accessible than 
it is in the bell-shaped flowers of the true Heaths ; and the perfume attracts a 
multitude of bees and other insects. It is accordingly the custom in the north to 
take bee-hives up on to the moors to secure the fragrant heather honey. The eight 
stamens are united by their anthers in a ring round the style, the anther-pores being 
on the sides of the anther-lobes where they are in contact. The awns projecting 
almost at right angles are hairy, serving thus, perhaps, to retain the honey ; whilst 
the proboscis of the insect hovering below the flower on touching one of these 
sixteen minute radiating levers will break the ring of anthers and liberate the 
powdery pollen, which is carried by wind as well as by insects. 
Although the precise determining causes are not ascertained, Ling seldom occurs 
on calcareous soil. Always social, and far more abundant than the Erica , in the poor 
sandy or gravelly soils of the lowlands it occurs with Birch and Bracken beyond the 
shade of the Oak in the Oak-birch heath association or Quercetum ericetosum of the 
ecologists, Birch, Scots Fir, and Aspen being almost the only seedling trees that can 
hold their own amid its roots and shade. On the thin, dry peat and pure sand of 
the Bagshot area the Ling is as strikingly dominant as on the moors of the north, 
mixed with Erica cinerea in drier, and E. Tetralix in moister, heaths. It is, however, 
in the Scottish Highlands, though with a sparing admixture of other species, such as 
Club-mosses, Mountain Ash, Bracken, and Pyrola, that the dominance of Calluna is 
most strikingly seen. There, when the rays of the rising August sun fell on the 
mountain, 
“as each heathy top they kiss’d. 
It gleam’d a purple amethyst." 
