For nearly fifty miles across the UK county of Norfolk, the Peddars Way runs (arrow-straight for the most part) to end (or begin, take your choice) at Holme-next-the-Sea on the coast. I’ve walked a good deal of it, not all. Parts of it make up almost every one of my favourite loop walks in west Norfolk, my beloved second home.
Maybe it started life as a Roman road, or maybe the Romans improved part of the Icknield Way, a prehistoric trackway, an argument perhaps given more credence by the discovery (or re-discovery, as the locals will tell you) of Sea Henge, a ‘henge’ of wood and stump in the sands near Holme. Now it’s a long-distance footpath, connecting with others: in theory I could start at Holme and walk all the way to Lyme Regis in Dorset, a distance of about 250 miles.
At its closest point to the west Norfolk village where we spend our winters, it’s a track undulating over the chalk, marking the boundary between both private estates and civil parishes, as these very old trackways tend to do. On this stretch, yellowhammers frequent the hedgerows, singing the song usually written as ‘little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, but that I hear as ‘see-me-see-me-see-me-please’. Yellowhammers are a bunting, a type of sparrow, related to our juncos and towhees. Ammer simply means ‘bunting’, and the ‘yellow’ is self-evident.
As a child growing up in Canada but reading English children’s books — Enid Blyton in particular — the yellowhammer was an iconic English bird. (Blyton’s books helped popularize the transcription of the call to ‘little bit of bread and no cheese’.) As an adult, writing my own books that call on the Roman occupation of Britain as the basis for their fictional world, I was struck one day, as I walked the Peddars Way, by this realization: nearly two thousand years past, the Roman soldiers stationed in west Norfolk would have heard the yellowhammer’s song as they walked along this same road, heading to or from the coastal fort or signal station. The legion stationed in Norfolk had come from Pannonia, in the Hungarian plain (we know this from archaeological finds) — where, too, yellowhammers sing their staccato song. The birds must have been a reminder of home. So yellowhammers feature in my books, singing ‘see-me-see-me-see-me-please’, as a tribute to the bird linking me to those soldiers in history, landscape and imagination.
But writers and artists other than me have found inspiration on this ancient trackway: Hugh Lupton, Liz McGowan, and Tom Perkins were the creators of the Norfolk Songline project, beginning with temporary installations but eventually establishing a line of permanent sculptures along the Peddars Way, sculptures with snatches of verse on each. One echoes my own sense of connection:
Surveyors have made their lines on the land/Trapping Albion in a net of roads/A taut web on the edge of empire…
…not unlike the net of lines that map the surface of the yellowhammer’s eggs, in a woven nest, low to the ground, along this ancient road.
Your transcription of the Yellowhammer's song makes much more sense than 'little bit of bread and no cheese'!