The lapwing or plover, is a very mysterious bird. Sadly much rarer these days, its haunting cry is still firmly etched in my mind, when one could often hear it on the moors.
It was the lapwing that was the bird which was involved with the bringing together of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, whose entrance was made even more famous by Handel's stirring 'Entrance of the Queen of Sheba'. She was the ultimate lady of magic and mystery and the source of the Shekinah, which we now call the Holy Grail.
In Britain, the lapwing was a prophetic bird. Donald Mackay, in This Was My Glen, wrote about Broubster, SW of Thurso in Caithness. He tells us that old James Macrory was a prophet who foretold the coming of the Macdonalds to the Sandridge Estate, because lapwings calling in Gaelic between Broubster and Reay on the hillside, sung to him "Willock-a wease se Innes tha bhain ach 'se Domhnullach bhios.' This translates as 'Its Innes that's in, but its Macdonald that's coming.'
In one of the Welsh Triads, Trioedd Ynys Prydein number 84, the mysterious Battle of Cad Godeu or Battle of the Tree Tops, was brought about by a bitch, roebuck and plover (lapwing). This battle was partly about the secret knowledge of the power of the letters and the trees, but it is far more than that. The bitch, was as Robert Graves observed, the Goddess herself as we discover in the various Neolithic burial chambers named after the bitch, whereas the roebuck is the source of the chase through the tangled forest of those tree tops which emerge as combatants in the conflict with an unnamed enemy. Yet it is fairly obvious that the enemy of the trees just happens to be a rather overpopulated species who develops land, which should be left to nature. So the lapwing may be reduced in numbers, but her time will come again......
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