The Forest of Dean enters the narrative as both a place of wild goshawks and the remembered setting of an encounter that returns in dreams. Years before Helen Macdonald began dreaming of hawks, an injured-looking female goshawk was brought to the bird-of-prey centre where she worked; its recovery and sudden release became an image she replayed as grief and rain gathered around her.

Landscape and Setting

The remembered country at the edge of England, before it gives way to Wales, is marked by red earth, coal workings, wet forest and wild goshawks. The Forest of Dean is evoked through this combination of working-land history and untamed woodland rather than as a surveyed or settled landscape. Its goshawks belong to a place that feels both materially specific and resistant to human possession.

The forest’s presence also sharpens the scale of the encounter. When Macdonald sees the old female goshawk, she thinks of it as a dinosaur drawn from the Forest of Dean: not simply an animal in a room, but a remnant of a deeper, older world. The bird’s peppery, rusty scent, compared to storm rain, makes that antiquity bodily and immediate.

The Goshawk Encounter

The encounter took place years before the dreams that frame the memory. An adult female goshawk had hit a fence while hunting and been found unconscious. Someone placed her in a cardboard box and brought her to the centre, where staff gathered around the box in a darkened room to determine whether she was injured. The boss reached inside with a gloved left hand; after a brief scuffle, the bird emerged, crest raised and barred chest feathers puffed in aggression and fear.

The examination made her formidable presence tangible. Staff carefully spread her broad wings and checked their narrow, hollow bones, then felt along her collarbone, scaled legs and long black talons. When a finger was held before each fiery orange eye, the goshawk snapped her beak. She then fixed her gaze on Macdonald. In that look, the bird seemed larger and more important than the human watching her, and older than ordinary human time: an impression reinforced by her massive grey back and muscular build.

Nothing was wrong with her. The staff took her outside and released her; she opened her wings and vanished over a hedge. The abruptness of her departure mattered: she did not remain for human care or explanation, but slipped from view into the damp Gloucestershire air.

Memory and Narrative Significance

As Macdonald’s grief and the persistent rain deepen, dreams of hawks begin to recur. The Forest of Dean memory supplies their first charged image: the goshawk’s sudden appearance in the room, her direct stare, and her disappearance into the landscape. The recollection returns repeatedly, and the released bird’s vanishing becomes the scene that the later dreams replay.

The forest therefore functions less as a backdrop than as the remembered source of an encounter with wildness that cannot be contained. Its association with the goshawk links place to recurrence: the bird is gone, yet the memory remains, turning the Forest of Dean into the point from which the hawk becomes, in Macdonald’s account, inevitable.