Gorse badly damaged by harsh winter: Country diary 100 years ago

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 May 1917Our Cornish driver said today that here they had had “two winters in one, and that a bad one.” Certainly one does not remember ever to have seen gorse so badly damaged. One thinks of gorse and ling as the hardiest of hardy shrubs, yet here there are great tracts of whin quite sandbrown, and the green, young shoots of the ling are only beginning to prevail over the dead surface. If you beat a bush of ling you have the queer