To raise awareness of

More than programme making

I will go there as soon as I finish. It also misses some places in the north of England that are Curlew hotspots, but in terms of a walk, the Irish loughs, the mountains of Wales and the farmland of England hold many stories, folklore and personal tales of Curlews, and most of them yet to be told. Those I already know about show how much the Curlew has influenced our cultural life. They appear in spiritual writings, poetry, literature, art and music. From earliest times, Curlews were woven into the folklore of farmers and fishermen, even monks. One medieval monk wrote, “The Curlew cannot sleep at all/ His voice is shrill above the deep / Reverberations of the storm; / Between the streams he will not sleep.” That evocative call must have been a constant refrain over the lakes and bogs, melancholic and powerful. “In the Curlew calling time of Irish dusk,” wrote John Masefield about the glens of Antrim, a place where St Patrick worked as a shepherd, and tradition has it that Curlews arrive back in the hills to breed on the Feast of St Patrick, March 17th. In many works of literary fiction their call is used as a kind of mood music, indicating a feeling of yearning, passion or grief. They carry messages from the wilderness, evoking for many what the Welsh call ‘hiraeth’. There is no direct English translation but is best thought of as a mixture of longing or wistfulness. The Oxford and Merriam Webster dictionaries define hiraeth as “a homesickness for a home you cannot return to, or that never was.”