‘This is a book about how birds put places in our hearts …’

‘We must find meaning in place again, through birds and all wild lives, if we are to ensure our own physical and emotional survival. We need these spirits of place.’

What would our places be without birds? Birds have long inspired our emotional and imaginative connections to physical environments, but where did it all begin? In English culture these relationships are as old as England itself, and the clues are all around us. Birds are not just part of place; they evoke and shape our very sense of it. Hidden in the names of our towns and villages are the ghostly traces of birds conjuring powerful identities for people in Dark Age landscapes.

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

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