The Cuckoo's Lea provides an exquisitely crafted book all about our natural environment, guided by the ancient secrets of our place names. Michael J. Warren explores the English cultural connection with birds and how their presence are not just part of a place; they evoke and shape our sense of it.

The past is hauntingly and movingly present on timeless marshes wher4e curlews cry desolation, in forests where goshawks are breeding again for the first time in centuries, in silent cuckoo-woods lost under concrete sprawl, and in 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.