The Land Rail's Death

There is an authenticity about the setting and the sheer texture of the landscape. I was quite careful with the language, not just local dialect terms but also the way that the different generations would use language. If you're a nature writer and you're writing a book set a hundred years ago one of the most startling things will be how much more abundant wildlife was. A bird like a corn crate which they refer to as a Land Rail, suffered enormous losses to the point where in the 1990s they were extinct from mainland Britain. Mowing machines are what did for them because they couldn't get out of the way quickly enough.