County Mayo is where T. H. White, away from the war in 1939, rents Sheskin Lodge and begins to imagine a book about hawks. The place matters not simply as a refuge: amid his falcons and their training, White turns the work of falconry into a way to think about education, freedom, and the forces that bind people and animals.

Setting and retreat

On a breezy August day in 1939, White is in Ireland, telling himself that his departure is not mere cowardice. He believes he would be wasted as a soldier and that finishing his epic about the Matter of Britain is a more important task: a work that might explain why humans fight. County Mayo is the destination of this self-justifying retreat. There, he rents Sheskin Lodge, a crumbling aristocratic bungalow with a glassed-in winter garden, set among acres of rhododendron and pine.

White’s falconry at Sheskin Lodge

Falconry is part of the daily life White brings to the lodge. Cully is dead, but he has trained two merlins and now keeps two peregrines: Cressida, a bad-tempered falcon, and a nervous young male that has not yet been named. Their training has been occupying him; for half an hour before his change of direction, he records its careful stages in a vellum-bound journal. The sound of hawk-bells from the lawn accompanies his pause and prompts him to reconsider a book he had once tried, and failed, to write.

From refuge to literary project

White decides that a book about hawks should not be a conventional naturalist’s account. He wants to write what he considers real literature, placing the falconer inside the hawk’s education and casting training as a sequence of ceremonies and ordeals. His imagined roles move from inquisitor and ritual healer to Prospero, the magician who guides the hawks through adolescence. The lodge thus becomes the setting for a consequential shift: the place he has chosen to escape wartime duty also gives him the occasion to reconceive falconry as a story about growing up and freedom. His account of the hawk’s development is bound to the human trainer’s presence and actions, rather than presenting the bird as an object of detached observation.