He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and rough undergrowth.
The grass was short and green, and there were clothes—props cut from bracken stems, with lines of plaited rushes, and a heap of tiny clothes pins—but no pocket-handkerchiefs!
What with avoiding the holes, and wading through waist-high gorse and bracken, it took the boys an hour or so even to get up into the hills to practice.
He found himself in a dense wood. There was no sign of a path, and he advanced cautiously. The bracken was so thick and high that it easily concealed him.
You didn't really walk on the island of Berk, you waded -- through heather or bracken or mud or snow, which clung on to your legs and made them difficult to lift.
But back home in Cumbria, you pick a fell from a Wainwright guide, and you get some scrappy directions to a muddy path behind a barn, winding its way through bracken and farmland.
" These abrupt changes of vegetation—this little spongeous tract of water plants, and on either side of it all the growths are tough or brittle—heather, bracken, hurts, pines. Very charming, very charming" .
My companion seemed to share in my feelings, and let the horse go slower and slower as he sat inhaling the green forest scents, chief amongst which was the smell of the trodden bracken near the wayside.