The Cuckoo's Lea by Michael Warren review – a magical ornithological history of Britain

The Guardian

18-06-2025

Old place names recall old ways of belonging. They often reference characteristics of the land or its use, the people who lived there, or the non-human lives they were enmeshed with. A great many of these vivifying genii loci are birds, although their identities aren't always obvious because language evolves over time. We need a guide.
Enter Michael Warren: teacher of English, amateur ornithologist and a man who lives in a Britain different to the one most of us inhabit: a medieval one, which by some magic has 'survived in another dimension parallel to our own'. The gift he bestows in this gorgeous book is that, by the end, we live there too, newly able to read the growth rings of place, and to perceive an alternative land shimmering over the one we already know.
The secrets lie in plain sight and plain speech, spelled out on maps, road signs and along urban streets: toponyms invoking cranes and crows, hawks and geese, eagles and owls, swallows and the geac – an old name whose plural geacs became the Ex of Exbourne (Devon) and the Yax of Yaxley (Cambridgeshire). That bird, unlikely as it may seem, is the cuckoo. I've just spent a week in the species' stronghold of Dartmoor, hearing them close to our tent and recognising for the first time, thanks to this book, their neurotic yikker and throat-clearing 'gowk', which is still the bird's northern and Scots name.
Some may already know that the eco of ecology and economy is from the Greek oikos, meaning 'home'. But go back further, explains Warren, and we reach a proto-Indo-European root word ueik, which via the Old English wic also gives us wick, a word relating to settlement: literally, a place where life happens. For our forebears, birds often were that life, a presence that turned space into place: the cuckoo clearing (Yaxley), owl valley (Ousden), buzzard stone (Wroxton), jackdaw stream (Cabourne); woodpecker pool (Finmere), cranes' brook (Cranbrook).
Warren's wordcraft is sublime. His description of a perching tawny owl, for example: 'In the monochromatic shades of night, sharpened to high contrast by the glare of intrusive light [its] eyes are sunless planets … two gaping bores, as though someone blew the night clean through the back of its skull.' If there is something of The Peregrine author JA Baker in that example, Warren's style is more textured and generous, weaving fascination, family life, and lightly carried expertise. There are other voices too: those of naturalists, writers and a gamekeeper-turned-goose-guardian who accompany him on some of his quests, plus the time-worn words of poets, scribes, monks and scholars. Of particular importance are 131 sheets of bound vellum held by Exeter Cathedral since at least AD1072. The Exeter Book contains almost all we have of Old English poetry and the earliest written mention of many of our birds.
The bird most often invoked in English toponyms is not the cuckoo, nor the ubiquitous crow. It is the crane – a species we lost for a few centuries and whose persona now seems hitched to ideas of unpeopled wilderness. It was not always so, suggests Warren. While cranes have been elevated by rarity, gulls were once quasi-angelic, their clinging to inhospitable coastal rocks evoking the monks who established their cells at the extreme edges of these islands. Now diminished in popular perception, they are seen as gutter-life, scavengers on the trash-tides of our consumerism.
Given the loss of many of the birds Warren references from the places named after them, this book comes to seem like a long-form prayer of sorts, a eulogy – or, to put it another way, a recalling of fire from embers. No journey in Britain will be quite the same again.
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The Cuckoo's Lea: The Forgotten History of Birds and Place by Michael Warren is published by Bloomsbury Wildlife (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.