The snow on the heath was bright and LITTY ...

English spelling must drive people nuts when they're trying to learn the language. It's not as bad as Gaelic or Irish or French, when it comes to silent letters or letters used only as signs that Something Odd Is Supposed to Happen to this Consonant Here, but it does seem to be all over the place. Blame it on the Norman French and then the Great Vowel Shift (which linguists in their lonely lives sometimes call the Great Vowel Movement).

Anyhow, whenever the Christian missionaries went to an illiterate people, they adapted the alphabet they had to fit the native language, or they invented a new alphabet, or they did a bit of both. But at all costs they were careful to describe the sounds exactly as they heard them, with each meaningful sound for a letter, and one letter for each sound. English used to be pronounced EXACTLY as it was written, and written EXACTLY as it was pronounced. That means, for example, that our WR- words were really pronounced with a WR at the beginning (try it!).

We also had, in Anglo Saxon and for a while in some Middle English dialects, WL- words, like WLANC ("proud," "arrogant") and WLITIG ("shining," "beautiful"). It's from WLITIG that I'm imagining a modern survival, LITTY, meaning the same things -- shiny and beautiful. The initial WL- is probably a reflex of WEL- and WAL- roots having to do with health and strength: English WELL, WIELD; Latin VALERE; Germanic WALT; Slavic VLAD- ...

So then: The snow on the heath was bright and LITTY ...