The Cuckoo's Arrival

The warmth has settled. The April rains have worked themselves into the soil and the path gives slightly underfoot where it used to be hard. Somewhere across England the cuckoo is calling. This week: a Dorset farmhouse with a skull on a shelf, why the cuckoo prefers heathland to woodland, cleavers for the hair, and a bluebell wood that has been a wood since before the Armada.

On the Horizon

The sky holds a deep saturated blue for an hour after the sun has gone, a colour that only arrives in late April, and only in clear weather. Shearing preparations are starting in the uplands, the flocks gathered and checked before the season opens properly. The asparagus has come in at last: the first proper spears, cut in the morning and on the plate by lunch, which is the only honest way to eat them.

Rogation Sunday approaches. The old walking of the parish boundaries to bless the crops, a custom that survives now in perhaps thirty or forty parishes in England, though it once happened in almost every one. The boundary stones are still there even where the walking has stopped. If you are passing one in the next fortnight, look for a flat-topped marker stone half-buried in a verge and grown over with moss. They tend to outlast their purpose.

Rogation customs: English Folk Dance and Song Society

The Sky This Week

Sunrise 5.43am  ·  Sunset 8.15pm
Moon  First quarter on Friday – half-lit in the south-western sky after dark.
Harwich tides  High 2.50am  ·  Low 8.38am  ·  High 3.16pm  ·  Low 9.04pm.

The Lyrids are trailing off after their peak earlier in the week, and a handful may still cross the sky on Friday and Saturday night. They are the oldest meteor shower on human record – Chinese astronomers noted them in 687 BC, and the debris we pass through each April comes from a comet last seen in 1861. Best after midnight, looking east, with the half-moon setting early enough to leave the sky properly dark by two. Jupiter sits high in the west after sunset, the brightest thing up there. Venus is the bright one in the east before dawn. On Wednesday evening the waxing moon passes close to Jupiter, close enough to hold both in one glance.

Sunrise/sunset: timeanddate.com, Baldock  ·  Moon phases: Royal Observatory Greenwich  ·  Tides: UKHO EasyTide  ·  Lyrids: Natural History Museum

The Curious Instance of the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe

Bettiscombe Manor, in a fold of the Dorset hills above Bridport, is a plain stone farmhouse with a human skull on a shelf. The skull has been there, on a shelf or in a chimney piece, for at least two hundred years. For most of that time, the local explanation ran like this: the skull belonged to a Black servant of the Pinney family, brought to England from the West Indies in the eighteenth century, who asked as he lay dying to have his body returned to his homeland for burial. The request was ignored. The screaming started soon afterwards, from the direction of the churchyard, and stopped only when the body was brought back to the manor. Over time the flesh went and the skull was all that remained.

This is the story the antiquarian John Symonds Udal heard when he visited Bettiscombe in the 1900s. When Udal investigated further, he found two things. The first was that an older villager remembered the legend in a simpler form – a faithful servant, a memento, no screaming at all. The screaming was a Victorian addition. The second was that the Pinney estate records in Nevis listed an enslaved man named Bettiscombe, who had died of a fractured skull.

In 1963 the skull was taken to the Royal College of Surgeons. Professor Gilbert Causey examined it and reported that it was female, in her early twenties, and approximately two thousand years old – Iron Age, probably Durotrigian, the people who built the hillforts of Dorset before the Romans came. The skull on the shelf at Bettiscombe is not the skull of a man called Bettiscombe. It is the skull of a young woman who died around the time Christ was born, found in or near a Dorset field, and somewhere in the eighteenth century named after the man whose story it now carries. The name it goes by is not its own.

Bettiscombe Manor is private, but the village is in Marshwood Vale, west Dorset, an hour from Dorchester and worth the drive in late spring for the lanes alone. The Pinney Papers are held in the special collections at the University of Bristol if you want to read them. The hillforts the Durotriges built – Pilsdon Pen, Lewesdon, Eggardon – are all walkable from Bettiscombe in an afternoon. Stand on Pilsdon Pen on a clear evening and the country the skull came from is laid out below you, the sea visible in the south, no boundaries you can see. The skull is somewhere in there.

J. S. Udal, Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club (1910)  ·  Pinney Papers: University of Bristol Special Collections  ·  Durotriges hillforts: English Heritage

The Heath

The Cuckoo and the Heath

The cuckoo's call carries. It is a specific acoustic fact, and the reason cuckoos have been heard across open country since the days before anyone thought to write it down. The two-note phrase is a territorial announcement, and the territory is open ground. On heathland, where the scrub sits low and the vegetation is broken, the sound travels differently from the way it does in woodland. There is nothing to absorb it. A cuckoo on a Surrey heath can be heard at a distance that would be impossible among trees.

The bird arrives in late April to a particular kind of landscape: open ground holding a specific suite of small nesting passerines. Meadow pipits are the primary host species on heathland; dunnocks take the role in scrubby habitat and gardens; reed warblers do the work by water. The egg is deposited in a host nest at exactly the right stage, where eggs are already laid but not yet hatched, and the operation is brisk. The whole transaction takes under ten seconds: locate, approach, remove one host egg, deposit its own. The female may lay up to twenty eggs in a season, each in a different nest. The host pair raise the cuckoo chick. Within days of hatching, the chick evicts their own young from the nest, one by one, by manoeuvring them onto its back and tipping them over the edge.

The cuckoo returns from sub-Saharan Africa in a consistent window during the last days of April. The first call of the season has been recorded by naturalists and farmers for long enough that variations mean something. A cuckoo heard before the middle of April is early. If the call does not come until well into May, it is a reading of the spring – a cold one, with insects still not flying freely. The cuckoo's migration is not triggered by temperature in Britain. It arrives when the insects do. Details from the BTO Cuckoo Tracking Project.

If you want to hear one this week, the heaths of Surrey, the Suffolk Sandlings, the New Forest, and the Brecks of East Anglia are the most reliable ground in England. The RSPB reserves at Thursley Common and Minsmere both report annual arrivals, and both have boardwalks suitable for an early-morning visit before the wind picks up. Go before nine, stand still, and let the bird find you. The two notes will reach you across half a mile of open ground.

Cuckoo ecology: BTO Cuckoo Tracking Project  ·  RSPB Thursley Common: rspb.org.uk  ·  RSPB Minsmere: rspb.org.uk

The Garden Plot

Weather Watch

A warm, dry week, by the look of it. Daytime highs settling in the high teens, nights still cool but no longer frosty. The soil is working well underfoot and the ground is warm enough for seeds to germinate outside as well as under cover. Keep one eye on the forecast for Friday night – a clear sky under the first quarter moon could still drop the temperature sharply, and tender plants set out too early will feel it. Watering will become a job for the first time this week if the dry spell holds.

For the Longer Game

Late April is the old signal for sowing runner beans and squash under cover. Start them in small pots on a warm windowsill. They need heat to germinate and will be ready to plant out in late May when the nights are reliably mild. Sow two seeds per pot and thin to the strongest seedling once the first true leaves appear.

For this week

Asparagus crowns planted two or three years ago should be giving their first proper harvest now. Cut the spears when they reach fifteen centimetres. Asparagus loses its sweetness within hours of cutting, which is why the Larder this week is built around it.

The chore

Bluebells spreading into the lawn from a neighbouring garden or bed need attention now, before they set seed. Dig out the bulbs individually rather than using weedkiller near other plants. Slow work, but containable if you catch it early.

The Larder

Asparagus

The asparagus has come in at last, which means the kitchen has six weeks to make the most of it before the season closes on Midsummer.

English asparagus has been grown commercially in the Vale of Evesham, the Wisbech fens, and Formby on the Lancashire coast since at least the seventeenth century. John Evelyn, in Acetaria (1699), called it "sperage" and recommended it boiled briefly, dressed with butter and a little vinegar – which is essentially how it has been eaten in English country houses ever since. Book of Household Management (1861) ran the same instruction with marginally more punctuation. The traditional cut-off date for the season is 21 June, Midsummer's Day, after which the spears are left to grow into ferns and feed the crowns for next year. A grower who keeps cutting after Midsummer pays for it the following spring.

Snap rather than cut the spears – they break naturally where the woody base meets the tender stem. Boil briefly in well-salted water for three to four minutes, depending on thickness, until the spears just yield when you pinch them. Dress with butter and salt and eat with your fingers. If you want to push it further: butter-fried with a poached egg on top and a shower of grated parmesan, or grilled on a hot pan and drizzled with good olive oil. Asparagus is one of the few vegetables that genuinely loses something when you complicate it.

Asparagus Risotto

Ingredients

• 900ml vegetable stock
• 250g asparagus spears, trimmed and cut into 2–3 pieces
• 30g butter
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 garlic clove, crushed
• 175g risotto rice
• 30g parmesan, finely grated, plus extra to serve
• 1 tbsp chopped chives
• 1 lemon, zested and ½ juiced

Method

1. Heat the stock in a pan until simmering. Blanch the asparagus in the stock for 30 seconds then scoop out with a slotted spoon and drain.
2. Melt a knob of the butter with the olive oil in a large deep frying pan, then cook the onion for 10 minutes until softened. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute before adding the rice, stirring for a few minutes until the rice is glossy.
3. Add the stock a ladleful at a time, stirring, until the rice is just tender – it should have a little bite but not be chalky. You may need to add a little more water at the end.
4. Add the asparagus to the pan and cook for 1 minute. Stir in the remaining butter and cheese, season, and put on a lid. Leave to sit off the heat for 3 minutes, then stir through the chives, lemon zest and juice, and serve in warm bowls with extra cheese.

Serves two as a main, four as a starter.

Asparagus does not preserve well in the way other spring veg does, but a quick refrigerator pickle holds the flavour for a fortnight beyond the cut. Trim the spears, blanch for a minute, refresh in cold water, and pack into a jar with a brine of equal water and white wine vinegar, plus a teaspoon of sugar, a teaspoon of salt, and whatever aromatics you like (peppercorns, dill, a strip of lemon peel, fennel seed). Three days in the fridge before opening, three weeks at the outside before they go soft. By the time the jar is empty, the season is closing.

John Evelyn, Acetaria (1699)  ·  Mrs Beeton's, Book of Household Management (1861)

The Still-Room

Comfrey

While the asparagus gets the kitchen's attention, comfrey has been quietly getting on with things in the damp corners of the garden since March. Comfrey is the still-room's working plant rather than its glamour one: nothing decorative about it, but few preparations are more useful by the time the leaves are back.

The Latin name Symphytum officinale comes from the Greek symphyo, to make grow together, which is the practice the plant is built around. The leaf and root contain allantoin, a compound that genuinely accelerates cell proliferation in damaged tissue. The country names – knitbone, bruisewort, boneset – are not metaphor. Culpeper recommended it for fractures and sprains. Dorothy Hartley, in The Land of England (1979), recorded farmworkers still using a comfrey poultice on bruised hands and shins within living memory. The use stopped not because it was ineffective but because doctors were quicker to reach.

Comfrey Salve

after country still-room practice

Ingredients

• A large handful of fresh comfrey leaves (or half that quantity of dried)
• Enough olive oil to cover the leaves in a jar
• Beeswax — 12g per 100ml of infused oil

Method

1. Wilt the fresh leaves on a clean tea towel for two days until dry to the touch but still green. This removes moisture that would prevent the salve from keeping.
2. Pack the wilted leaves into a clean jar, cover completely with olive oil, and stand the jar in a warm place for three to four weeks. Shake every few days.
3. Strain the oil through muslin into a small pan, pressing the leaves to extract the last of it.
4. For every 100ml of infused oil, weigh out 12g of beeswax. Warm together over the lowest possible heat until the wax has melted.
5. Pour into small clean jars. The salve sets as it cools. Label with the date. Keeps for a year.

Use on bruises, sprains, and sore joints. Avoid on broken skin and open wounds — the same compound that knits tissue will close over surface bacteria. Modern guidance is also against internal use of comfrey due to pyrrolizidine alkaloids in the root; the external salve has no such concern.

The Weekend Walk

The Bluebell Wood

Find a bluebell wood in the last week of April, when the flowers are at their peak. The light inside one has a particular quality, green-filtered and faintly underwater, shifting with the density of the canopy overhead. Where the tree cover is thicker, the bluebells thin out. The pattern of flowers across the floor is a map of the canopy above.

The native English bluebell reproduces slowly, spreads slowly, and builds its colonies across decades and centuries. A dense carpet almost certainly means woodland continuously wooded since before 1600. The Spanish bluebell, common in gardens and disturbed ground, is erect and broader-belled, with flowers arranged around the whole stem. The native hangs. Every flower faces the same direction, and the stem curves under the weight of them. Take ten seconds at the edge of the wood and check the stem – this is how you know which kind of wood you have walked into.

Roy Vickery, in his archive of British plant lore, records that bluebells were called Fairy Thimbles in parts of the West Country, and a wood in full flower was not considered a place to linger in alone. To wander in was to risk being pixy-led, disoriented by the carpet of flowers and unable to find the way back. As you walk, watch the path itself. Where it stays well-trodden through the flowers, you are standing on a route people have used for as long as the wood has been a wood, which the bluebells around you suggest is at least four hundred years.

Bluebell ecology: Woodland Trust  ·  Folklore: Roy Vickery, Plant-Lore

An Old Word for It

Cuckoo-storm. A regional name, recorded in Yorkshire and the Welsh borders from at least the eighteenth century, for the spell of cold, wet, windy weather that often arrives in late April just as the cuckoo does. The bird and the storm are linked in folk reading, though only one causes the other (the cold delays the insects, which delays the bird). The word is still in current use among some upland farmers and recorded in the English Dialect Dictionary (Joseph Wright, 1898–1905). If your week feels colder than your calendar suggests, the older word for it is on hand. Listen for the cuckoo at the same time, and the connection will be obvious.

In Good Report

A piece of news worth passing on, from this week.

The Bugs Matter survey is open for its 2026 season, a full month earlier than previous years. Run by Buglife and Kent Wildlife Trust, it is the simplest piece of citizen science in the country: clean your number plate before a drive, count the insect splats on it afterwards, log the count and the route in a free app. The earlier start this year is designed to catch the early-emerging insects that previous seasons missed, and to track how far forward into April the season is actually shifting.

The headline figures from the survey so far are sobering — a 63 per cent fall in flying insect splat rates across the UK since 2004, nearly 60 per cent since 2021 alone. But sobering figures need counters behind them to become data, and the counters are volunteers in ordinary cars on ordinary journeys. The cuckoo arrives when the insects do. This is how we know whether they still are.

The Turning Wheel

25 April – St Mark's Day. Traditional date in southern England for sowing parsnips.

28 April – Old St George's Day under the pre-1752 calendar.

1 May – Beltane. The old Celtic cross-quarter day marking the start of summer in the folk calendar. May Day customs across England, from the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss to garland-hanging on church towers.

3 May – Rogation Sunday. The walking of the parish boundaries to bless the crops, surviving in around forty parishes nationally.

Yours, until Thursday.

Meg.