Every winter, starlings gather over the plantations around Davidstow on Bodmin Moor. They come from elsewhere – Scandinavia, Eastern Europe – drawn by the relative warmth of a Cornish winter, and for a few months they fill the sky above the moor in their thousands before disappearing again in spring.
They are never quite settled. Never quite home.
I began photographing them in October 2025, returning to the same area several times each week, in the early mornings and the failing light. At the time, my own sense of home was dissolving. A thirteen year relationship had ended. The house I had lived in was being sold. I was sleeping in my sister’s spare room, watching my life rearrange itself around me.
I have lived in Cornwall my whole life, and yet I felt a long way from anywhere I recognised.
These photographs are not autobiography. But they were made by someone who understood what it might feel like to be one of those birds – passing through, belonging nowhere in particular, waiting for something to settle.
