A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1467 entries
slack
A slack is a hollow, and in coastal terms it is the damp low ground between sand dune ridges, where the surface has been blown down close to the water table. Dune slacks flood in winter and dry in summer, and because they are wet, lime-rich, and grazed by rabbits, they carry a flora found almost nowhere else: marsh orchids, creeping willow, and several very rare specialists.
Etymology
The word came into northern English from Norse, meaning a hollow or a shallow valley, and it appears widely in northern place names for a dip in a hillside. It is unrelated to the ordinary English slack meaning loose, which is Old English, and to slackwater, which uses that second sense.
Notes
Dune slacks are a stage rather than a permanent feature and they succeed to scrub if left alone, which is why the rarest dune plants depend on continued disturbance: rabbit grazing, blowing sand, and in several nature reserves deliberate scraping back to bare sand with a digger.