very fine April. The snakebirds or wrynecks were Iscreaming all along the road as he set out. The horses were all shining, the white windmills were turning with mad, downward plunges ‘fit to make you mad’.” So opens a by the poet and nature writer Edward Thomas, published in 1906. More than any other author, Thomas makes me feel nostalgia for a rural England that vanished long before we were born. Those wrynecks “all along the road”: plainly, they were a common species in the southern chalklands that Thomas loved. But “screaming”? That sounded a bit extreme.
