Into the West

The red-billed chough is the most dashing crow in the world. These rare, flamboyant, scarlet-legged, scarlet-billed denizens of Britain’s Celtic coasts are communal and comic, intelligent and daring. They’re also sublime aeronauts, riding the breeze as though they’re made of it.

For writer Horatio Clare, the chough is his totem. He’s loved the bird since he first encountered it in the 1980s during childhood holidays to Pembrokeshire. And more than forty years on from that joyous first encounter he still seeks them out. It’s his annual pilgrimage.

In this episode of Illuminated, we join Horatio on that pilgrimage as he tells the story of a bird with a beak and legs the colour of a saint’s blood… or perhaps a king’s blood; whose cry says its name and whose presence symbolises a nation’s identity. It’s the story of a bird which embodies myths… and creates new ones; a bird which fled into the West over two centuries ago and which is finally returning to a wider world.

Horatio begins his journey on Pen Llŷn, the westernmost spur of North Wales and one of the red-billed chough’s strongholds. His guide as he walks the sea cliffs is naturalist and folklorist Twm Elias. Twm lived alongside chough as he grew up on Llŷn and remembers a childhood visit to Caernarfon Castle, where his friend Dic John made a grab for the Castle’s ‘tame’ chough – and got a painful pecking in return.

Twm sees chough as a symbol of the wild coastal areas of north Wales. But it’s also wrapped up in ideas of Cornish identity too. Dr. Loveday Jenkin grew up on stories of King Arthur becoming a chough when he died. Yet, just as she heard those stories, the very last choughs were dying out in Cornwall.

But then, in 2001, thirty years after the last chough disappeared, three birds from Ireland made landfall in the far west of Cornwall. The following year two of them built a nest and the population grew from there. Hilary Mitchell from Cornwall Birds tells the story of how the avian symbol and spirit of the county returned.

The chough is associated now with the western Celtic coasts. But once upon a time it ranged right across the British Isles. And maybe it will again. Horatio heads in the opposite direction… east… to a place which hasn’t seen chough for at least two centuries, despite the bird being embedded in its iconography.

In Dover he meets Paul Hadaway from Kent Wildlife Trust to discover how a bird which was a symbol of the martyr and saint Thomas a Becket is once again flying in Kentish skies. And Jenny Luddington from the Trust explains how she’s drawn on an old tradition of hooden creatures – carved wooden animal heads on poles – to create a hooden chough and tell the story of the bird’s return to Kent.

Horatio Clare discovers that the chough’s story has come full circle as old myths rehatch and new ones take wing.

Presenter: Horatio Clare Producer: Jeremy Grange Editor: Chris Ledgard A BBC Audio Wales production for BBC Radio 4