Michael J. Warren
In the Steps of J.A. Baker

Sunday 07 June 2026, 9.00am – 1.00pm
Heybridge Basin | Northey Island

Join Essex-based author of The Cuckoo’s Lea, Michael J. Warren for one of our Radical Islands walks to mark the centenary of the birth of pioneering nature-writer J.A. Baker, author of The Peregrine.

Retracing Baker’s steps, we will explore Northey Island, the site of the Battle of Maldon and erstwhile home of Nobel Peace Prize Winner Norman Angell, to discover what makes this saltmarsh coast so distinctive and inspirational.

Meeting Point: Heybridge Basin (also the end point)
Terrain: Paths are a mix of solid and potentially muddy sections

Tickets: £15 / £12 concessions (students, under 27s and unwaged)
Box Office: eventbrite.co.uk

Michael J. Warren

Photo of Michael J Warren © Ginny Warren

Michael J. Warren is an author, medievalist and naturalist. He teaches English in Chelmsford, was honorary research fellow at Birkbeck College, chair of the steering group for New Networks for Nature, and is currently a trustee for Curlew Action. Michael curates The Birds and Place Project, a website devoted to collecting and recording the birds of English place names.

The Cuckoo’s Lea: The Forgotten 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.

‘Magical … No journey in Britain will be quite the same again.’ – The Guardian

Buy a hardback copy of the book from bookshop.org.

Order a paperback copy of the book from bookshop.org – released 04 June 2026