Lillian Watts’s bench has fallen into disrepair, so instead I sit on Arthur’s Seat on the common. Warmth rises from the heath, even on this chilly spring morning, and a lizard creates curvaceous lines under the dry, still-dormant heather.

It is both Lillian’s and my birthday, though she died in 1989, aged 93. I play a recording of her from 1975, from the village’s history society. Poet, potter, English teacher, naturalist and formidable campaigner, she, along with villagers such as Arthur Cooke (1898-1980), saved this place from development. Lillian’s voice is measured, soft and annunciated, with the clipped vowels of her time.

Crumplehorn Cottage. Photograph: Nicola Chester

She first came to the common on a birthday cycling trip in 1907, to hear its famous nightingales, and during her visit she met the large Romany encampment. Returning married in 1935 to live in the wonderfully named Crumplehorn Cottage on the edge of the common, Lillian found many of the Gypsy families – respected village members by all accounts – “removed”, yet settled as her neighbours, or in new council houses built on part of the heath. The rest of the heath was by now a Poor’s Allotment, used for grazing and the gathering of gorse bundles (“furzy bavins”)  whose quick, crackling heat would fire bread ovens.

Lillian rented 12 acres where, alongside neighbours’ geese, pigs and horses, she cleared some of the scrub. She found a scarce pale dog violet, Viola lactea, as well as petty whin, bog asphodel, lousewort, milkwort and dodder. In 1970, with the common threatened by development, the village invited the Wildlife Trust to rent it; they agreed. When Lillian left the trust her beloved Crumplehorn, it was able to buy the common, and her legacy was complete.

At the end of the tape, Lillian takes us on to the common to hear a nightingale – loud, beautiful and gone now. In the background, the birdsong astonishes. When the recording finishes, I listen to the birds around me. What was a rich aural blur is now ragged with absence, yet still here. If you did not know what Lillian knew, you would think it rich with willow and garden warblers, blackcaps and chiffchaffs, and the first cuckoo, almost always heard here first.