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We remember places through their birds. We remember the corners of suburban woods where Eurasian Sparrowhawks Accipiter nisus lurk, the bushes where we see Eurasian Bullfinches Pyrrhula pyrrhula a bit more frequently, the stretch of water that holds just a handful more ducks than others. Yet it seems impossible in Britain today, where nature is held at arm’s length, that this could have ever been a widespread practice for naming places. In some, the bird lurks in plain sight, as in Cransford (or Crane’s Ford), Suffolk. Some are more abstract, such as Purbeck, Dorset – the old English for a hill ridge that looks like the bill of a Eurasian Bittern Botaurus stellaris. I was staggered to learn that particular comparison – an image that any writer would die for – from Michael Warren's fascinating The Cuckoo's Lea. 

It is a truism that time may be forever passing but it has never truly passed. Warren, a medievalist, states as much in his introduction: ‘We live in medieval places. Quite literally.’ In The Cuckoo’s Lea, Warren demonstrates the truth of his assertion through birds, through place names and (very) old literature, steeping them in a rich brew, seasoned with anecdotes of his time in the field. The resulting concoction is one of the most unique works of nature writing in recent years, original in its ambition and successful in its execution. 

Beginning with a trespass in Glydwish (kite marsh), Warren crosses Britain by species, from the Common Cranes Grus grus of east Norfolk, to the Common Cuckoos Cuculus canorus of Devon; the gull headlands of Islay to the owl woods of Kent. Beautifully drawn encounters with species are laced through each chapter. One highlight is the rapt retelling of discovering breeding Northern Goshawks Accipiter gentilis in his local wood, interspersed with wrocca (buzzard) and hafoc (hawks and falcons) place names, medieval falconry and Geoffrey Chaucer. We learn from Warren that hawk place names are an indicator of the relationship we had with ecology and economy. That medieval falconry required first finding your hawk and then flying it in the right places once trained, necessitating a deep knowledge of the species and its places that we have mostly lost. 

If that makes The Cuckoo’s Lea sound excessively highbrow, it is not. Warren is clearly a polymath but his diversions into medieval literature, Anglo-Saxon charters and the finer details of etymology are always lightly worn, never cleverness for cleverness’s sake. He visits Yaxley in Cambridgeshire – the cuckoo’s lea of the title – and finds himself in a 1960s concrete shopping arcade, eating takeaway chips in the rain, being honest enough to state that to ‘find a sense of the past is difficult everywhere here’. 

What is the relevance of the past? Warren describes his task as looking for the ‘Ghosts of birds in the ghosts of places’. These ghosts pose interesting questions. He uncovers a scattering of Common Nightingale Luscinia megarhynchos place names in Wales, yet none at all in England: a mirroring of their present-day distribution, a suggestion of some almost forgotten past abundance, preserved via the ‘eos’ of Welsh place names. If they were once present, why can’t they be again? As if to prove it, Warren learns first hand from nature reserve staff the practical side of Nightingale conservation, another knowledge that we hope doesn’t pass into history. 

Like all histories, The Cuckoo’s Lea looks backwards rather than forwards. But in doing so it draws out the role birds used to play in the lives of our medieval ancestors, how integral they were to making spaces into places. And how, if you too have a habit of nicknaming places by the birds you find there, you are feeling the same impulse that drove our ancestors. But it seems an unavoidable echo to me these days, when the political pressure to build new homes and towns is increasing: with a grim irony these new places are frequently named for the nature that was there first, erased entirely by their creation. The Cuckoo’s Lea shows it wasn’t always thus. 

Michael Warren has written an exhilarating exploration of birds and words, shedding new light on how the past of a place makes us rethink the present and how the present reveals what has been before. 

Stephen Rutt