A despatch from our story-writer-in-residence Penny Walker.
13 July 2026, Southport to Tarleton, 13 miles
The air is wobbling over the flat land which grows pale brown grass out of grey-red soil.
Sweat and suncream on my glasses make me lose focus.
I cannot make sense of it. Dry, bone dry, both sides of the flood bank.
Clouds rising in the middle distance could be irrigation spray, or dust from combining, or smoke. The moors have been on fire, so why not this low, parched place?
The vegetation has shrunk to joyless colours: beiges, greys, khaki. It is camouflaging itself against the sun. Everything sags.
Everything except the post-and-wire fence running alongside the track, on what would be the waterside of the flood bank, if there were any water.
We have dropped down the bank in search of shade (no chance) or something more interesting to look at.
The fence is upright, perky, with strong wooden posts set every couple of yards, and spacious squares of wire woven between. There are two taught rows of barbed wire at the top, to show this fence means business.
And there is a bird on the wire.
Not perched, ready to fly, but tangled and very, very dead.
At first sight, I think it could have been hung there by some country shaman, warding off avian poachers, like the murdered murder of crows I saw hanging by their feet from a hurdle years ago in the brutal fields of Suffolk.
I get as close as I dare, but I see no twine or knots, and the bird is twisted, spread-eagled confusingly in a way which seems both too random and too intricate for a person to have done it.
The corpse has darned itself into the fence. This is its spine, its limbs, its dark feathers – maybe tail, maybe flight. This is its obscenely naked sternum, like the keel of a boat. One limb is hooked over the wire as if it is the casually draped arm of a happy man relaxing on a sunny bench.
I take a picture and move on, aware of being the slower walker in this twosome.
A few posts further and there is a second dead bird. Fewer bones, more feathers, some fluffy. The body is so embedded in the wire that I wonder if it has been held there at the top of fence by water, and washed back and forth by wave and tide until it has felted itself utterly.
There are places where spools of grass have wrapped around the fence, which also holds bleached driftwood, twiggy and thin, like fine bones, spread across the warp and weft, poorly woven.
Further still, a third bird, white, feathers curved over like an elegant hat. An egret perhaps. There is not enough of it for me to identify. Does the rising body count make it more interesting, or less?
I’m sad, horrified, curious. Without an explanation. I photograph them all.
I think the birds were probably already sick or dead before they were snared. At other places on this walk we saw warning signs about avian flu.
I think they have been carried here by a flood tide, like the grass and small branches. Not deliberately killed. Not meaningfully arranged. Just loose dead or dying matter, flotsamming to a random sticking point and abandoned to dry and be exhibited on this hot, answerless day.
