The Cuckoo’s Lea: A Secret History of Birds and Place

Birds have long inspired our emotional and imaginative connections to physical environments, but where did it all begin?

Hidden in the names of English towns and villages, in copses, fields, lanes and hills, are the ghostly traces of birds conjuring powerful identities for people in ancient landscapes. What are their stories and secrets? How did people encounter birds over a thousand years ago?

In The Cuckoo’s Lea, Michael J. Warren sets out on the trail of these ghosts. Captivated and guided by the secrets of place names, he finds their stories entangled with his own explorations of places through birds all across England. The past is hauntingly and movingly present on timeless marshes where curlews cry, where goshawks are breeding again for the first time in centuries, through silent cuckoo-woods lost under concrete sprawl, in the winter roosts of corvids and an owl village that vanished centuries ago.

Weaving together early literature, history and ornithology, this book takes readers on a journey far into the past to contemplate the nature of place and to discover a fascinating heritage that matters deeply to us now when so many places and their birds are threatened or already gone.

Michael J. Warren is a medievalist, naturalist and author of Birds in Medieval English Poetry. He teaches English at a school in Chelmsford, was honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College and is a series editor of Medieval Ecocriticisms. His nature writing has appeared in magazines such as Aeon and EarthLines, and he was chair of the steering group for New Networks for Nature. Michael curates The Birds and Place Project, a website devoted to recording the wildlife of Britain’s place names.