Harry Mead hails a remarkable and poetic portrait of the raven, once declared extinct in England, but now flying high once again

One of Joe Shute’s first sightings of a raven was in the Dales village of Stalling Busk, overlooking Semerwater. He and his wife were admiring the view when, announced by a guttural “kronk”, the “powerful” bird “flew into our eyeline”. As they watched, it “rocketed down the valley with its wings tucked behind it”.

Remarkably, on a later visit to the same place Joe and his wife marvelled at a very different display by a raven, perhaps the same bird. First sighted moving across the sky “with languid flapping of its wings”, it was soon closely harried by a mob of jackdaws and a buzzard. The raven evaded them by twisting and corkscrewing with an ease that left Joe and his wife “open mouthed in amazement”. At that moment, Joe says, he realised that “this supposed bird of death in fact animates a landscape, brings it to life”.

That discovery cemented a fascination with ravens for Joe that has inspired him to write a deeply personal portrait of a bird known to most only for its association with the Tower of London. But Joe, a national newspaper feature writer passionate about nature, explains and explores what he reveals to have been the raven’s profound place in human culture.

In prehistoric burials, especially from the Iron Age, raven bones have been found alongside human skeletons. It is believed they were offered as gifts to the gods of the underworld, whose bird the raven was.

The Romans, Joe tells us, were “in thrall to the raven’s capacity for violence and destruction”. They gave a public funeral to a raven that had nested on the Roman Forum. The Vikings displayed ravens on their shields and released birds from their longboats to guide them to land. William the Conqueror fought under a raven banner.

More prosaic, ravens were valued as street scavengers in medieval days. But when that role vanished through improved sanitation, the raven, like many other birds of prey, was heavily persecuted. Declared extinct in England in 1871, it survived in the 20th century only at the remotest extremities of Britain.

But the raven’s dark shadow, the product of its bulky body and wingspan of up to five feet, is once again appearing widely over Britain. With an estimated 12,000 breeding pairs, there are now ravens in every county. Though still rare down the eastern edge of Britain, nesting sites range from rugged cliffs in the Orkneys to the Dungeness marshes in Kent, the Bristol gorge, and even Chester Cathedral. Joe, who lives near Sheffield, on the edge of the Peak District, observes them in a quarry close to the A1.

The raven is an undeniably savage bird. In Caithness, the havoc it wreaks among lambs has led farmers to erect lambing sheds. The bird is quick to spot casualties and invariably beats humans to the scene. Where licensed culling is allowed, marksmen can seldom get close enough with a shotgun before the bird flies off.

The raven’s strong intelligence was noted long ago by the Roman chronicler Pliny, who observed birds dropping pebbles into a vase to raise the water level. Travelling far and wide to meet people who keep ravens, Joe came across a bird that could play Kerplunk and a child’s xylophone.

A scientist who has studied ravens told Joe: “Behind that beady eye is a brainy, soulful creature”. Joe adopts the word ‘soulful’ as a key definer of the raven. After quoting a gamekeeper’s remark that the raven “eyes people up and down like a gorilla”, Joe reflects: “In the countless conversations I have had with people about ravens, this is often what it comes back to: a feeling that the bird exists on a higher spiritual plane… There is a sense that somehow, for good or ill, this bird of darkness has arrived to tell us something.”

They might have told us that the legend that the kingdom will fall if the ravens disappear from the Tower of London is bunkum. Joe does that for them. The Tower ravens were introduced only in Victorian times. And one night in the Blitz the entire colony died, probably of shock. We should now be under the Nazi jackboot.

Joe leaves that revelation to almost the end of his engrossing book. His purpose is more serious. Stressing the raven’s former centrality to our culture, mirrored in facts such as that most villages had a “raven tree”, generally the tallest in the parish, where ravens had nested immemorially, and more place names and topographical features are derived from the raven than any other bird, he seeks goodwill for its return.

“The progress of man is measured out in the species we have lain waste to,” he writes. 208 He sees the raven’s comeback as “providing us with a glimpse of wildness in a world hell-bent on civilising its furthest reaches, while at the same time inching close to the abyss.”

With 15 raven nesting sites now established in the Dales, the chances of witnessing spectacles like those that spurred Joe to produce this probably definitive portrait of one of our most remarkable yet under-celebrated birds are rising.

  • A Shadow Above: The Fall and Rise of the Raven by Joe Shute (Bloomsbury £16.99)