Where the Whistlers Fly

E. M. Thornbury
Field Correspondent, The Isles & the Otherworld

Fieldnotes — the Staffordshire moorland edge, late autumn

The old six-inch maps of this country have a habit of giving out. Not failing exactly, but thinning: the hachures grow sparser, the field names stop being annotated, and somewhere past the last farm the surveyor has simply written rough pasture or moor and left it at that. I have spent enough afternoons with these sheets spread on pub tables to have developed a fondness for that thinning. It is honest. It tells you plainly where the measured world runs out and something else begins.

People who worked that edge for a living, the drovers, the miners, the men who cut peat on the tops, kept their own instrument for reading it, and it was not a compass. It was the ear. Across the Midlands and into Wales there survives a belief in the Seven Whistlers, birds heard flying overhead in the dark, calling to one another in voices that were agreed by everyone who heard them to be wrong, too high, too sad, not quite any bird a person could put a name to. Nobody I have spoken to claims to have seen them. That is rather the point. In the pit villages around here it was said that if a collier heard the Seven Whistlers on his way to the shift, he would turn back rather than go down that day, and no foreman thought less of him for it. The birds were not decoration. They were information, arriving from a part of the world that did not keep regular hours.

I think of the Whistlers now whenever I stand at the point where a marked path gives up and becomes simply ground. There is always a moment of adjustment, a small argument between the part of you that trusts the map and the part that has just noticed the map has stopped trusting itself. Older travellers managed that moment with waymarks rather than paper: a standing stone at the parish boundary, a cairn on a col, a stile that meant less as a piece of carpentry than as a sentence, this far the known country, past here your own account of things. Cartographers used to fill the unmeasured spaces with sea monsters and warnings, which we now treat as decoration, but which functioned, I think, exactly as the Whistlers did. Both were a way of marking the edge of confidence without pretending the far side did not exist.

What strikes me, going back through the accounts, is that none of them treat the beyond as forbidden. Feared, respected, listened for, yes. But the drover still drove his cattle over the top. The peat cutter still went up. The moor was crossed constantly by people who took the omens seriously and went anyway, adjusting their timing, their nerve, their attention, rather than their route. That seems to me the useful inheritance here, more than the birds themselves: a tradition that expected you to notice the edge of the map, to feel the ground change under the word rough pasture, and to go on regardless with your ears open.

I walked out past the last stone on the ridge that evening with no particular birds calling, only the wind doing an adequate impression of several, and stood a while at the place where the path gives out into heather with no further instruction from anyone. It is a specific kind of quiet, that. Not empty. Attentive. The sort of quiet that used to have whistling in it, if you were the sort who heard such things, and a crescent moon overhead that owed nothing to any surveyor's line.

E. M. Thornbury is a field correspondent of the Wyrdlore Society, reporting from the Isles & the Otherworld. She walks boundaries — parish bounds, hedge banks, the lines where one field's law stops and another begins, and the markers people put there to make the change legible. She keeps meticulous notes, and distrusts every conclusion in them, including her own.