{"id":3515050,"date":"2025-08-14T09:43:02","date_gmt":"2025-08-14T09:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3515050"},"modified":"2025-08-15T08:42:40","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T08:42:40","slug":"land-beneath-the-waves-excerpt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-08-14\/land-beneath-the-waves-excerpt\/","title":{"rendered":"Land Beneath the Waves: Excerpt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bookcover\"This piece is excerpted from Land Beneath the Waves: How the Natural World Helped One Woman Navigate Chronic Illness, Self-Acceptance and Belonging<\/a> by Nic Wilson, and is published by Summersdale, \u00a318.99.<\/em><\/p>\n

As always when life becomes too difficult, I look to the natural world for inspiration. I\u2019m in luck. It\u2019s early spring, so there\u2019s plenty happening outside to keep me busy. I watch a kingfisher plunge-diving for stickleback in the reedbed pond and spend a quiet afternoon top-dressing the pots in the garden with compost. Over the fields, skylarks sing and a smattering of lapwings exult in daredevil display flights. Unlike me, the natural world is making progress, seemingly more alive every day.<\/p>\n

I walk outside as much as my energy levels allow and return to researching local natural history, enjoying the academic detachment it offers. One day, while browsing the British Newspaper Archives, I come across an article in the Cardiff Evening Express from 1898 entitled \u2018Praying for the Crops\u2019. It wasn\u2019t unusual at this time for regional papers to cover stories from beyond their bounds, and the article describes the revival of the Rogation Day tradition in Hitchin, where clergy, choristers and congregation would make their way out to local fields and homesteads (in this case, those of nearby Walsworth and Purwell) to bless the crops with prayers and hymns. I read the account of the procession and the corn \u2018strong in the blade and of a very good colour\u2019 with interest, but it\u2019s the opening of the piece that catches my eye. Hitchin is described as \u2018an old-fashioned market town, some thirty miles from London, a district famous for its lavender and for its nightingales.\u2019 I know about the lavender, but not the nightingales. My curiosity is piqued.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen a nightingale in Hertfordshire. In fact, I\u2019d only ever encountered the legendary songster in poetry and music before I moved down south. At university, I studied Keats\u2019s \u2018Ode To A Nightingale\u2019 and sang of love inspired by the nightingale\u2019s song: \u2018Liebe mich, geliebtes Herz \/ K\u00fcsse mich im Dunkeln!\u2019 (\u2018Love me, dear heart \/ Kiss me in the dark!\u2019) in Brahms\u2019s Liebeslieder Walzer. If I thought of nightingales back then, it was as aesthetic muses or romantic metaphors, not as birds of feather, blood and bone, of thickset hedge and scrubby woodland.<\/p>\n

When we moved to Hitchin in January 2003, we rented a twobed terrace just off Nightingale Road \u2013 a convenient location close to the train station. The Nightingale pub across the road had seen better days. Our walk into town passed Nightingale Cottages, two of the oldest properties in the north-east quarter of the town. Opening our bedroom sash window on summer evenings, we could hear birds warbling, whistling and trilling, flaunting their mimicry skills. Not nightingales, of course, but the day\u2019s soundbites replayed by the rooftop starlings. One specialised in mobile phone ringtones. It caught us out more than once and I missed its musical jingles when we moved.<\/p>\n

In mid-April of that year, I saw my first nightingale on a family walk around Paxton Pits Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire.<\/p>\n

Even though the reserve had 28 singing males, I felt lucky to see and hear this denizen of the understorey. It was also my granny\u2019s first encounter with a nightingale, a bird she had wanted to hear all her life. She finally achieved her wish two days after her eightieth birthday. A couple of weeks later, I set my alarm for 3.15 a.m. and joined a dawn chorus walk at Sandy, where I heard my second nightingale of the season. At Minsmere, at the end of May, I upped my tally to three.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the nature reserves of Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Suffolk, the landscape around my first rented house in Hitchin felt urban and uninspiring. Though I spent a couple of years surrounded by titular nightingales, it never occurred to me to wonder about the origins of the local road, pub and cottage names. And even if it had, there\u2019d have been little information to go on. No one seems certain how Nightingale Road got its name. According to Two Minutes to the Station, a local history study of the area, the origins of the road are \u2018lost in the mists of time\u2019. But now, with the Cardiff newspaper article in mind, I\u2019m curious to know if there\u2019s more to the old place names than I thought. I start to search for Hitchin\u2019s nightingales in earnest, an ornithological pilgrimage that provides a welcome distraction from my personal narrative with all its detours, delays and dead ends.<\/p>\n

The earliest record I can find is from 16 April 1811. On this spring day in Hitchin, over two centuries ago, Joseph Ransom, a 26-year-old Quaker, noted in his Naturalist\u2019s Notebook:<\/p>\n

\u2018Wrynecks, Redstarts, Nightingales & Blackcaps have all arrived within these few days.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Seventy-seven years later, the first Hitchin nightingale of the season was recorded in the journal of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society on 18 April by Alfred Ransom, Joseph\u2019s nephew. Alfred lived in Benslow House, on the opposite side of Benslow Lane to his younger brother, William. Nightingales sang in Alfred\u2019s pleasure grounds, perhaps in the trees his father had planted on the hill a generation earlier. If I\u2019d been labouring in Purwell Field 150 years ago, in the spot where my house now stands, their strident song would have carried to me across the newly built railway line.<\/p>\n

The Natural History Society journal recorded the dates of natural phenomena every year in the interests of science.<\/p>\n

\u2018Who does not listen for the first note of the nightingale?\u2019 members were asked in 1876. \u2018Who does not look out for the first swallow? Who cannot help saying, once a year at least, \u201cThere\u2019s the cuckoo!\u201d\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even the county\u2019s youth were seen as valuable contributors.<\/p>\n

Children should be trained, members were advised,<\/p>\n

\u2018to observe the blossoming of wildflowers, and to look out for the arrival of birds, etc., which observations might be recorded by their parents and sent to the Society.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reading through the journals from the late nineteenth century to the present day is like pressing fast forward on a disaster movie. In 1877, Hertfordshire corn miller and respected ornithologist John Littleboy read his paper \u2018The Birds of Our District\u2019 to the society. Littleboy noted that the nightingale \u2018generally reaches this district between the 10th and 21st of April\u2019 and recounted the story of a relative who had induced three nightingales to come for food whenever she called them. In 1884, he reported that the birds were \u2018less abundant\u2019 and, by 1889, nightingales were becoming scarcer in the county every year, perhaps partly because:<\/p>\n

no bird is more easily caught by that pernicious race the birdcatchers than the nightingale, and, though sold at a high price, on none is their cruelty more gratuitously exercised.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Around the turn of the century, Hertfordshire\u2019s nightingales were \u2018either very scarce or very silent\u2019 and, in 1913, the county bird recorder William Bickerton noted sadly that:<\/p>\n

References to the Queen of British songsters (though it is the male bird that sings, and not his queen) become less and less frequent in the reports that reach me as the years go by, so I am afraid there is no doubt that the bird is getting scarcer in Hertfordshire. This is certainly true for the Watford district, for I do not now hear a tenth of the numbers of nightingales in song as I did some eight or ten years ago. Coppices and spinneys which always contained their annual pair are now tenantless of nightingales, though the immediate surroundings of such former haunts are in no way changed. It is difficult to account for their gradual disappearance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fading of the nightingale\u2019s song seems to me an ironic reflection of the Greek myth of Procne, Queen of Thrace, and her sister, Philomela. Procne is married to King Tereus, who rapes Philomela and cuts out her tongue to ensure her silence. Philomela weaves her tale into a tapestry and the sisters enact revenge by killing Tereus\u2019s son. As the king chases the women, they transform into birds \u2013 in Ovid\u2019s version of the tale, Procne into a swallow and her sister, a nightingale. Thus, Philomela escapes and acquires a new voice with which to recount her sad history. Perhaps her lament, where it could still be heard in Hertfordshire, took on a new resonance for listeners at the beginning of the twentieth century if they recalled the abundance of past decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thus, Philomela escapes and acquires a new voice with which to recount her sad history. Perhaps her lament, where it could still be heard in Hertfordshire, took on a new resonance for listeners at the beginning of the twentieth century if they recalled the abundance of past decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3515405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79718,213530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","category-environment-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3515050"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515050\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3515416,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515050\/revisions\/3515416"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3515405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3515050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3515050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3515050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}