Bronwen Woven Bird House UK
The Longest Nights: Why a Dying Somerset Craft May Be the Little Birds' Last Chance Before the Hard Winter Ahead
Half of Britain feeds its garden birds. Hardly anyone asks where a wren goes when the feeder goes quiet at half past four on a December afternoon, or how much of it is left by morning. Bronwen Ashdown, 69, has spent eight winters on the Somerset Levels finding out. Every nest she makes comes from one field of straw, and that field is about to become a lorry park. What she has learned is going with it.
A Withy Shed on the Levels, Where the Kettle Is Always On
The shed was built for stripping willow, a long timber room with a concrete floor and a stove in the corner that has been lit every morning since the first week of October. It smells of straw and woodsmoke. Sheaves of long wheat straw stand against the walls, tied with baler twine and labelled in pencil with the year they were cut. On the bench lies a short length of cow horn with the end sawn off, the old way of gauging a straw coil. Bronwen Ashdown, 69, feeds straw through it with one hand and binds it with a strip of split bramble with the other. She keeps going while she talks. Her grandfather taught her that a coil left half-finished is a coil that comes loose.
"Everybody worries about the birds being hungry," she says, still coiling. "Hungry isn't what gets them. There's a feeder in every other garden in Somerset. What gets them is the night. Sixteen hours of it in December, and nowhere dry to spend it."
The Sixteen Hours Nobody Thinks About
Here is the part of winter the bird-feeding leaflets leave out. A wren weighs about ten grams, a little more than a pound coin. On a December night in Somerset it has to keep its body at around forty degrees for sixteen hours, on fat it cannot top up until it's light enough to find a spider. Blue tits and great tits come out of a winter night measurably lighter than they went in, and on a hard frost they come out lighter still.
Put it in human terms and it is a twelve-stone man walking out of the door at dusk and coming back at breakfast half a stone lighter. Then doing it again that night. And the night after.
"Folk imagine them frozen solid on a branch," Bronwen says. "It's not like that. It's not the frost that has them. It's the bill. Every hour of dark costs them something, and by February some of them can't pay it."
Britain's farmland birds have fallen by more than half since the 1970s, and the reasons are the ones you'd expect: lost habitat, pesticides, cats. What gets far less attention is something Bronwen noticed from her own workshop door. It is not only the food that went. It is the bedrooms.
"Gramfer always said the jenny wrens want somewhere to go of a night. I thought that was just an old man talking. It took me till I was sixty-one to find out he was right."
And this is where most of us get it wrong, with the very best intentions. The bird box on the side of the shed is built for April: eggs, chicks, fledging. In December nobody is nesting. What a small bird needs from November to March isn't a nursery. It is somewhere to sleep.
Where Britain's Little Birds Used to Spend a Freezing Night, and What Became of It
Ask where a wren sleeps in January and most people say "in a hedge." Some do. But the small birds that stay with us all winter (wrens, tits, sparrows, the odd treecreeper) look for a hole on the coldest nights: a crack, a gap, a pocket out of the wind. For most of English history there were plenty. Bronwen can count them off on her fingers.
The Four Beds Britain's Birds Used to Have
Deep eaves, warm straw, a thousand little gaps. England had something like a million thatched roofs two centuries ago. There are about thirty-three thousand now. "Every cottage on the Levels was thatched when Gramfer was a boy," she says. "Every one of them had wrens in it."
More than half of Britain's hedges were grubbed out after the war, and for years the government paid farmers to do it. A laid hedge is a dense, thorny bedroom. A barbed-wire fence is not.
Stripped off for repointing, rendering and new windows. "People think ivy pulls a wall down," she says. "What it actually does is keep forty sparrows warm."
Full of beams and gaps, and every one of them had a wren in it somewhere. Now they're holiday lets with double glazing. "Lovely for a weekend in Somerset," Bronwen says. "Not so lovely if you weigh ten grams."
Read that list again. Not one of those four was ever built for a bird. Every one was a leftover: a roof nobody had replaced, a hedge nobody had grubbed out, a barn nobody had converted. And in a single lifetime we have tidied nearly every leftover away.
"Built for Chicks. Not for a Frost."
Almost every garden in Britain has one: the wooden bird box on the shed, the fence or the side of the house. It's the first thing most of us buy for the birds, and in April it does its job. The trouble is what it was built for: one pair, a clutch of eggs and a few mild weeks in spring. On a sixteen-hour night in January the same box is a cold, damp room out in the weather, and the birds that need a bed most are the ones it suits least.
"I'm not cross with anybody who's got one," Bronwen says. "I've two on the shed myself, for the blue tits in spring. But nobody tells you a nursery and a bedroom aren't the same thing. So the box goes up on a bare fence in March, the chicks are gone by June, and from November it's a cold wooden room in the wind."
Why the Bird Box on Your Fence Is the Wrong Bed for Winter
A square box with a flat floor, sized for one nest and one brood. It's made to keep chicks safe in spring, not to keep a huddle of wrens warm through a frost.
Most shop boxes are thin softwood or plywood. On a freezing night the damp of the birds' breath settles on the inside of the walls, and by morning it's frost. A small bird can't afford to spend the night warming a wet room.
Most go up where they're easy to see: high on a fence or shed wall, out in the wind, with no ivy or hedge around them. A small bird choosing a bed at dusk wants cover first. And the top of a fence is a cat's favourite path.
A flat hinged lid with no overhang. British rain comes in sideways and from above, runs down the front board and into the entrance hole. A wet bed on a frosty night is worse than a bare twig.
"That's the part that gets me," Bronwen says. "People spend good money wanting to do right by the birds, and the one thing nobody asks is where they'll sleep in January."
"A Proper Old Holly Beats Anything I Make"
Bronwen will tell you this herself before you ask. The best winter bedroom in Britain is a thick old holly, a wall of ivy or a laid hedge that's been left alone for twenty years. "If you've got one of those, you don't need me," she says. "Keep your money and put the kettle on."
Then she nods towards the new estates going up on the edge of Bridgwater. "But go and walk round one of those. Six-foot panels, a patio, a bit of lawn and a trampoline. There isn't a bed for a wren in the whole street. Telling those people to plant a holly and wait thirty years isn't advice. It's a shrug. A nest tied into whatever they've got, that they'll do. Ten minutes."
March 2018: The Morning After the Beast
Bronwen did not set out to make anything for birds. For thirty years she made straw bee skeps for beekeepers and coiled baskets for the craft fairs, the way her grandfather Bert had taught her when she was twelve. Bert had kept bees on the Levels all his life, and every autumn he hung one old, empty skep under the eaves of the shed "for the jenny wrens", as he put it. After he died, Bronwen left the last one where it hung, out of sentiment, and didn't think about it again.
Then, at the very end of February 2018, the Beast from the East came in off the North Sea. Snow drifted across the moor roads, the rhynes froze edge to edge, and the wind came in so cold that the willows cracked. On the second morning Bronwen went out to the shed and found small shapes under the hedge by the gate: a wren, a goldcrest, two long-tailed tits.
"And then I looked up at Gramfer's old skep, hanging there with snow on the top of it, and I lifted the edge to have a look," she says. Her hands go still for the first time all afternoon. "Nine wrens. Nine of them in there, packed together like peas in a pod, and every one of them alive. They sat tight till gone eight o'clock and then off they went as if nothing had happened. I had to go and sit in the car for ten minutes. I'm not one for crying."
That spring she took Bert's skep down, turned it over in her hands coil by coil until she understood exactly how he had made it, set it back on the shelf above the bench, and started making small ones of her own: straw nests sized for little birds, with a proper thatched hat on top. She pinned a calendar to the shed wall, and on every frosty night through the winter she walked round the garden and the neighbours' gardens with a torch and pencilled what she found. Droppings inside the door. A feather caught in the coil. A small brown bird slipping out at first light.
"Gramfer knew they'd use a skep. What he never wrote down was how to make one they'd come back to. That took me eight winters."
The Jenny Wren Principle: Five Details That Decide Whether a Wren Comes Back Tonight
A small bird picks its bed the way you'd pick a B&B on a filthy night: quickly, at dusk, and it only comes back if nothing went wrong the first time. Anything that swings, drips or lets the wind through gets one go. Eight winters of pencil marks on a shed wall, Bronwen says, came down to five things.
The Jenny Wren Principle
Straw laid in overlapping tiers the way a Somerset thatcher lays a roof, sitting on a solid wooden disc that overhangs the room below. The rain runs down the layers and drips off the edge, never into the doorway. "Gramfer's skeps had no hat, and the tops went soft by February. The hat was my first change."
Big enough for a wren, a blue tit, a coal tit or a great tit. Too small for a starling or a magpie's beak. And every millimetre you leave off the door is warmth that stays inside. "People think a big door's friendlier. It's only colder."
Small birds get through the worst nights by piling in together and sharing their heat. In Norfolk, sixty-one wrens were once found packed into one small space on a single freezing night. The round room has no cold corners and is sized for a handful of little birds pressed close. "They don't want a ballroom. They want to be packed in like eggs in a box."
Tight enough to stop the wind, loose enough to let the damp of their breath out, so there's no frost on the inside by morning. "A box sweats. Plastic sweats. Straw breathes. Why do you think every old roof in England was straw?"
Every nest has a jute loop for hanging and comes with a length of twine to bind it tight into ivy, a hedge, a holly or against a post, so it can't rock in the wind. "A skep that swings is a skep nobody stays in," Bronwen says. "That isn't mine. That's Gramfer's." It's the one change she says made the biggest difference on her calendars.
Eight Winters, Eight Calendars, 1,642 Pencil Marks
The calendars hang on a single nail by the shed door, one on top of the other, each a freebie from the feed merchant in Langport. Eight of them, the pages curled with damp, every frosty night marked in soft pencil. Every nest she has hung or given away is on there, and so is whether anything slept in it.
She lifts the pages back to an early winter. "The ones I tied into ivy or holly, they had wrens in them winter after winter," she says. "The ones I tried hanging free on a string off the same hedge? I stopped bothering after the second year. They never touched them. Not once."
Then she finds a page from December 2022, when the moor went down to minus nine for a week. 13th. -9. Back door nest in the ivy. Seven out at 7.48. "Seven wrens out of one little nest," she says, "like clowns out of a Mini."
And there's the retired postman in Wells who took one home from the Bath and West show in 2019. Every February since, a postcard has arrived at the shed with one number written on it: how many birds came out of his nest on the coldest morning of that winter. Bronwen has seven postcards pinned above the stove.
"That's my wages, that is. Not the money. Knowing there's a bit of straw off our field tied in a hedge in Wells, and on the coldest morning of the year a man's stood at his back door in his dressing gown counting wrens out of it."
Before You Buy Anything: Three Things That Cost Nothing
Before anybody orders a nest, Bronwen would like them to do three things first. She's firm about the order.
Leave the ivy. If it's on a fence, a shed or an old tree, let it be. A wall of ivy is the best free bedroom in any British garden.
Leave one untidy corner. Don't cut the hedge until late winter, and pile your autumn prunings and leaves in a back corner instead of taking them to the tip. It's a hotel for wrens.
Put it up in autumn, not spring. Birds choose their winter bedrooms before the first hard frost. "Hang it in January and you've missed the best of it," Bronwen says. "The best fortnight of the whole year is the one we're in now."
"Do those first," she says. "If you've got all three, you might not need me at all. Most people haven't."
What People Write After Their First Winter
"I'd honestly never given a thought to where they go at night. We've a lawn, a patio and a six-foot fence, and that's about it. Tied Bronwen's nest into the ivy by the back door in October. The week before Christmas my husband was at the sink at four o'clock and watched a little wren go straight in. Thirty years in the fire service and he went very quiet. He'll tell you it was the onions."
"We've had a bird box on the shed for years. Lovely in spring, but I never once saw anything go in it in winter. This one is a tiny thatched cottage tied into the ivy. It's the nicest thing in the garden, and now there's somebody living in it."
The Questions Bronwen Gets Asked Most
"Commonest question there is, and the answer's yes. The wren's the most common bird in the country. One in every eight birds breeding in Britain is a wren. They go to bed ten minutes after sunset and they're up before you've found your slippers. You don't see them because you're not looking at the right time. Stand at the back door one evening just after the sun's gone and watch."
"Two at the least. Gramfer never hung just the one, and he knew why. A jenny wren wants her bed low and deep in the ivy or the hedge. A blue tit wants his higher up, in the holly. And they don't share with strangers: a family of wrens will pile into one nest together, but the tits want their own. Then there's the wind. It comes off the moor from the west one week and down from the north the next. Put one on each side of the house and, whichever way it's blowing, there's a bed out of it. Most people who start with one ring back for a second before Christmas."
"Spring is for nesting. Autumn is when they go looking for somewhere to sleep. Wait till it's bitter and you've waited too long. Now is the time."
"Tie it into the ivy or the holly, not on the end of a fence a cat can walk along. The door's too small for anything bigger than a great tit, and the thatch hangs right over it. In eight winters I've had one cat story, and the cat was sat underneath it on the lawn, looking up."
"No, leave it be. They'd only throw it out again. They like it bare and clean, and they'll sort it out themselves."
The Last Straw From Moor Farm
Every nest Bronwen has ever made came from one place: a long strip of heritage thatching wheat at Moor Farm, a mile and a half from the shed. For thirty years the Coles family let her grow it on a handshake. Old, tall-strawed wheat that nobody grows for grain any more, cut by binder and stooked in the field the way Bert did it, because a combine crushes the straw flat and you can't coil a crushed stem. She knew which end ripened first and which week in August to cut before the rain came across from the Quantocks.
Last spring Moor Farm was sold. There are survey pegs across the field now, and a planning notice on the gate for a distribution park and lorry yard off the motorway. The diggers are booked for November. Her last cut came off it in August 2025, the summer before the sale.
"I could buy straw," she says. "It comes over from abroad on a lorry, combined, crushed, half of it rotten. That's not straw, that's bedding. I've grown on that field since I was thirty-nine. I'm sixty-nine. I'm not going round Somerset at my age begging another farmer for a strip."
Her son is a surveyor in Bristol. Nobody else in the family coils. When the last of that straw is used up, the calendars come down off the nail, and eight winters of knowing which bed a wren will take go quiet in a drawer in the kitchen.
What's left is on the shelves of the withy shed: the nests made from the last harvest off Moor Farm. There were 167 of them when we visited at the end of September.
"It Was Never About the Money. It Still Isn't."
Bronwen could charge what the craft galleries in Wells and Bath charge for hand-coiled work, and anyone who has held one of her nests would understand why. She won't. She has kept the price of the last harvest exactly where it has always been. Not as a sale. Not to clear the shelves. Because that's what she wants.
"I don't want the money. I want them up in hedges. I want somebody stood at their kitchen window one evening in January saying, 'She's gone in.' That's worth a lot more to me than whatever's on the label."
Her grandson Kit, 26, set up a small online shop, Cedar & Tin Co., after the phone in the cottage wouldn't stop ringing the winter before last. "Gran was taking orders on the back of seed packets," he says. "Turns out there are thousands of people who feed birds all winter and never once thought about where they sleep. Once they hear it, they can't unhear it."
Bronwen's Jenny Wren Nest, in Brief
Every nest is coiled and thatched by Bronwen Ashdown in her withy shed at Stoke St Gregory, from straw she grew and cut herself. Not a factory, not a production line. Eight winters and more than 1,600 pencil marks stand behind every one.
Made for sleeping, not nesting: somewhere for small birds to get through the long, cold nights from November to March.
About 22 cm tall and 17 cm wide, with a 35 mm wren door. Layered straw thatch on a wooden disc, a round woven room, a jute hanging loop, and tie-down twine included so it can be fixed firm and never swings.
167 nests remained when this article went to press. When the Moor Farm straw is gone, there's no restock, no second harvest and no successor.
Where to Find One
Bronwen's nests are available only through Cedar & Tin Co., the small online shop her grandson Kit runs from the spare room. You won't find them in garden centres or on any marketplace. A 69-year-old woman in a withy shed on the Somerset Levels can't supply one, and she has no intention of trying.
Before the First Hard Frost
On the Levels the first proper frost usually comes in the last week of October. All over Britain, the small birds that stay for the winter are already checking eaves, ivy and hedges for the place they'll spend the next five months of nights. The ones that find somewhere will be back at dusk. The ones that don't will spend January on a twig.
And the shelves in the withy shed are emptier every week. Last autumn's nests had all gone before Bonfire Night, and this year there will be no more straw once these are gone.
If you're ordering, Bronwen's own advice is to get two: one low in the ivy or hedge for the wrens, one higher up in a holly or conifer for the tits, on different sides of the house, so that on the coldest nights there's always one out of the wind.
"I want every one of them tied into a hedge by Christmas," Bronwen says. "That's all I'm asking. Somewhere out of the wind, near a window, and somebody who'll look out at dusk. The birds will do the rest."
Bronwen's Whole-Winter Promise
Winter doesn't run to a timetable, so this promise doesn't either. Tie it up and give it the winter. If you're not entirely happy with the nest itself (the coiling, the thatch, how it stands up to the weather), send it back for a full refund. No deadline, no conditions, no forms. Bronwen stands behind every nest that leaves her shed, and so does Cedar & Tin Co.. UK delivery is free.
More From the Gardens They Went To
"I volunteer at a wildlife rescue, and after every hard frost we have chilled wrens and tits brought in by the boxful. What Bronwen talks about (a roof that actually throws the rain off, a nest that doesn't swing, a door that small) is exactly the difference between a bedroom and an ornament. It's the only one I tell people to buy."
"We tied it into the holly on the 4th of October and felt a bit daft doing it. The first night it went below zero, there were droppings just inside the door. I stood at the back door in my coat three evenings running until I finally saw her go in. We'd not had a wren in this garden since we moved here."
"Bought one for us and one each for my two sisters for Christmas. Mum fed the birds every single winter of her life, rain or shine. Tying it into her old hedge felt like finishing something for her."
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