👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little bit of a phrase! Behold...
"False Heath."
10 seconds ago I was pretty sure this was just a weird British moor name. Turns out, nobody quite knows exactly what it means for
sure
, which frankly, is half the appeal. Let me unpack that.
Basically, "False Heath"—and you'll mostly see it cropping up in older heraldry and the fancypants descriptions of coats of arms—is a decorative flourish. Think of a real heath as a bit of windswept, slightly miserable moorland, right? Lots of heather, maybe some stubborn little bushes. What someone who was religiously fiddling with a coat of arms wanted to portray , when actually it wasn't a genuine heath, was something… flatter and shinier! It was essentially a deliberately misleading, almost aggressively pretty, grassy area meant for the sake of looking impressive. Heraldry is all about appearances; they wanted the impression that you were of the land, the sort who probably spent most of their leisure hours getting very muddy and regrettably uncomfortable. This, therefore, became "False Heath"—a little bit of a cheat in the face of actual topographical reality. You are essentially saying: "Here, look! A heath, but not really, we just wanted it to be pretty.” Now, there's some theorising that it might have originally actually been meant as a field of barley, if
