Can you say "bald hill" to mean a hill that has no trees on it? [closed]
Bald means
with little or no hair on the head (Cambridge)
so metaphorically, it would describe the hill as having no vegetation, not even grass. A hill of solid earth, or a hill after a huge fire that burnt everything. Maybe @Greybeard's suggestion of covered by sheets of rock is plausible, too, though I haven't thought of it when I first read the expression.
As I said in a comment, treeless is more accurate, but does not seem to correspond to the poetic tone I feel in the Russian sentence.
I would go for bare which means:
lacking a natural, usual, or appropriate covering (M-W)
Bare is used even technically to describe treeless hills. There is a book called
Regreening the Bare Hills (about the Tropical Forest Restoration in the Asia-Pacific Region)
Here is a somewhat poetic use of the expression bare hills:
...flowing between bare hills, without a tree or a thicket on its banks... (The Eclectic review)
ADDITION: Thanks to @Kate Bunting's interesting comment, here is an insight in the matter:
Night on Bald Mountain (Russian: Ночь на лысой горе, romanized: Noch′ na lysoy gore), also known as Night on the Bare Mountain, is a series of compositions by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881).
Bald Mountain is the most familiar translation of "лысой горе" (lysoy gore) in English, and is also the most literal. The adjective "bald" is commonly used in English place names for barren hills, mountains, and other features, and so is also idiomatic. However, because the most familiar use of "bald" describes hairlessness, this part of the title is also known as "Bare Mountain". The use of "bald" to describe barren landscapes is common in European languages. (Wikipedia)
I agree that bald is closer to barren, whereas bare has a certain vagueness that is welcome in this context.
The very first definition in Merriam-Webster [link] is:
: lacking a natural or usual covering (as of hair, vegetation, or nap)
(emphasis mine), and one of its examples is indeed "a bald hill".
That said, despite what the above definition might seem to imply, a "bald hill" may just be treeless [example], rather than lacking all vegetation, or may even just be treeless at the summit [example], in the same way that a "bald man" might lack hair only on the top of his head. Incidentally, Merriam-Webster doesn't mention this, but hills that are treeless at the summit are sometimes called balds (as a noun) [example], as are ones that are completely bare of vegetation [example].
I would guess that relatively few English-speakers are consciously aware of these uses, but I would expect most people to understand the idea in context. The exact phrase "a bald hill" appears in many books [link]. (But it's not as common as "a bare hill" [link].)
A hill like the one you describe I'd call a fell.
Interestingly, Wikipedia uses the word barren to describe the superficial features, meaning no – or very few – trees, but still some vegetation, typically moorland, so peat bogs, shrubs, grass etc.
Fell is a fairly specialized term, though, Wiktionary even calls it archaic:
fell (plural fells)
- (archaic outside Britain) A rocky ridge or chain of mountains.
- (archaic outside Britain) A wild field or upland moor.
Familiar to someone living in the northern parts of Great Britain, but less so to a typical North American I'd guess. Depending on the intended audience the more intuitive barren hill, as used by Wikipedia, might be better.