Radio Lento podcast

Our first really clear sound-view of the landscape came along a footpath a mile or so from Winchelsea station, with the A259 behind us and, according to the map at least, the open sea ahead. It was in all its peaceful wideness, its pastoral mildness, there to be heard, from inside a little outcrop of blackthorn trees. Every branch covered in the healthiest grey lichen we'd ever seen. Blossom just starting to appear. We named it lichen thicket. 

The land from Winchelsea to Rye is not only pleasantly low lying and bucolic, but the last before the shingle. We walked it before the summer came through all the new bright green, under a changeable April sky, under the thin calls of distant seagulls and passing geese. Hot sun shone between banks of fast moving cloud. Fresh breezes blew, they smelled at first of luscious hedgerows, then as we got closer, of the salty tidal zone.

A see-sawing great tit watched as we set up the microphones. Then as we scuffed away down the stony path, we heard the tumbling song of a chaffinch. Time begins to pass, pushed along by a gentle wind. Some falling drops of honey: a willow warbler. Distant activity on a farm. Yard dogs barking, rooks surveying the ground. Amidst the long quiet, two propeller planes pass, one behind the other. 

We stopped to step over a large brown caterpillar mid-way across the rough brambled footpath. All around us light breezes were sweeping through the high grasses, nettles and reeds. Miles and miles, of wide open estuary land. Then in the distance, amongst the just audible drones of lone cars on winding country roads, we heard the plaintive drooping call of a curlew. The water was close. The map showed we'd converge, ahead about a quarter of a mile.

Soft sand blending to mud then water. Gently swirling waves. High tide but on the turn. Pleasantly susurrating woodland and little wooden houses on stilts, some storing beached boats beneath. At the high water mark a gnarled weather-worn tree stands with a panoramic view of the estuary. It leans out precariously, towards the lapping waves, but is sturdy as rock. A good place for the microphones. We leave to brew tea and cook beans for the kids.

Yacht masts ring like lonely bells in the light wind. Two walkers stop to pick something up from the muddy sand. Perhaps an oyster shell, there are lots here. Boats squeak and bump reassuringly against their moorings. Two men bob about, fasten ropes, secure decks. Timelessly absorbed in the act of preparing to sail. Everything's settled, between gently lifting banks of estuary wind. From nowhere a blackbird begins to sing. The tide's very gradually going out. The clouds part and a wood pigeon welcomes the arrival of some hot uninterrupted afternoon sun.

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This is part eight, 3am to 4am of the twelve hour Suffolk Wood recording. We made it almost four years ago on a balmy summer night in August by leaving a pair of sensitive microphones spaced out like ears, to record non-stop in the heart of an uninhabited rural wood in Dedham Vale. It was the first overnight recording we ever made, and we had no idea what the microphones would hear. 

The wood is situated about three miles from the A12. In the evening, when we set things up, the noise of the road was barely audible, but in the dead of night, air cooled and still, the wood becomes transparent to the A12's pale grey drift that illuminates the landscape beyond, like aural moonlight. 

Close by, between the tree trunks and hidden amongst the ankle-deep leaf litter, are the dark bush crickets. They chirrup pleasantly through the whole night, stridulating their resonant bodies marking out the passage of time in slow, natural seconds. Owls haunt the empty voids, as do other strange and almost unearthly noises. The things we are unused to hearing, the things we may call dream-like.

Miniature deer called muntjac inhabit this ground, as do badgers, rabbits and other smaller mammals. Unworried by the microphones they move about with light footsteps on the dry leaves, so close you could almost touch them. A precious sound-view onto their world that our very presence would normally preclude.

There are so many surrounding sounds, from bits of dead wood dropping from the tree tops, to distant geese and ducks flying their nocturnal routes. There are also the planes. Passenger planes, possibly also military, emerging as soft rumbles from over the horizon, then passing in lazy arcs overhead, before dissolving away into the world beyond. For them this land below doesn't exist. 

And just over a mile away, from over the fields, the golden toned bell of St Mary's parish church strikes the hour. Bookends, to the slow passing of time in this peaceful rural wood. 

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To listen to the other episodes in this series and how the sound of the wood changes over time, visit the Radio Lento blog which lists them all in one handy place.

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Several miles up the sun-baked track, along overgrown footpaths and through fields high with meadow grass, lie the watery ditches of the Higham Marshes nature reserve. Nestled within the wide expanse of partly farmed, partly inhabited, but mostly untended land that runs along the lower reaches of the Thames Estuary in Kent. On a barmy summer's day, blown about by a friendly wind, it's a place of retreat and of well tempered quiet. 

Beside one of the wild ditches, from inside a hawthorn bush at the water's edge, we find a secret space to record. Well defended by thorns, it gently creaks in sympathy with the breeze, but has a birds-ear view of the nearby wildlife and the landscape beyond. 

The air is cooler beside the water. It rings with the pewit calls of the lapwings. Croaks stretchily with the marsh frogs. Echoes with the gliding yelps of distant geese. At ground level this world is all green and overgrown, but from the air, it must be laced with glints and pools.

Bees buzz quickly by and a farmer traverses a field on a quadbike. It's alive with sheep and lambs. Above, skylarks wheel beneath high thrumming planes. From over the horizon, fleeting whines of overtaking motors along a distant country road. These are the slow rhythms of an early summer's day on the Hoo Peninsula.

Set free from its cradled bowl, the smoke from the bargeman's pipe rose straight, into the sky. Lighter than air, the burning vapours knew all-too-well where they wanted to go. Up! And so up they went. Unravelling coils of wisdom, racing towards one small window of blue in the vast ashen sky.

Not in your lifetime, nor mine, the bargeman confided between tokes from his short black pipe, but sure as night follows day all of this'll be buried. His prophecy seemed to startle a bird out of a hedgerow, some fifty yards yonder along the towpath. It flapped low over the water before dropping into the scrub opposite. The barge horse, head deep in the thick grass beside the canal, only twitched an ear. 

Buried? I said, looking up and down the towpath, then up into the vastness of the sky. All of this? More mouthing the words than saying them. The bargeman made an arch with his work-worn hands. Black water, under a metalled sky.

The horse tore hungrily at the grass. The bird remained in its refuge. I watched as a curl of smoke lifted towards the patch of piercing blue. The bargeman saw me looking, then slowly let out a gentle smile. If you ask me I reckon they'll have to keep that little window up there.

His words made me fix my eye on it. Why will they do that? I whispered. To let the future in, when it comes knocking, he said, pulling up the horse's rope. That's the blue of the world beyond. The one that's tired of all our soot and smoke. Teach the children about the blue, for when it comes knocking. And Never Lock Your Door.

Built in the 1840s, the Tame Valley Canal was covered by the M6 motorway in the 1950s, and then overshadowed by further development of Spaghetti Junction in 1972. When we visited on a bright May day, there were no boats or birds on the water. The cars, motorbikes and lorries, oblivious to the space underneath. Just a few walkers and cyclists joined us in the empty space below the concrete.

There, in a dark tunnel under the road, a window onto the sky, placed to let the light and sound from above in. Impossibly placed graffiti on the other side of the canal said in huge letters 'Never Lock Your Door'.

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See photos from this place via our Twitter. Explore other brutal soundscapes. 

Mid-afternoon. June hot. An overgrown track on the Chatsworth Estate, close to the peaceful lakes above the house, between meadows and dense woodland. An abundance of fresh hoof marks. A route used not by people, but by livestock changing fields. Hedgerows scent the quiet air with pollen. Cow parsley, moist nettles, something like aniseed. Nobody is around, so we leave the microphones behind to record, on the trunk of a tree facing straight into the sound vista. 

Through the tall trees, beneath the loudly singing birds, come the echoes of cows. Knee deep and wading. Splashing and wallowing in the cool shallows. 

With us gone the true sound of the woodland is revealed. An infinite humming, of bees and countless tinier insects. It can, if we let it, grate with modern taste, but it is a key barometer of life. Humming is a sound-measure of biodiversity, and the louder it is, the healthier the ecosystem. This is a well place. 

The birds and the insects and the wallowing cows are, with the woodland and the lake, basking in the summer heat. And then, at nine minutes, the thing we never thought could happen... 

A magic spell. A sonorous rocking call. 

It's past midday on a late May day in Suffolk and the sun is pouring down onto a calm sea. It's shining, for the first time this year, with that summer strength that makes you stop, to really take in the moment. It's perfect, here at the shoreline, not far from where the River Deben joins the sea, the beaches a mix of shingle and soft sand. 

Listen. 

Hear the mesmerisingly detailed and spatial sound which shallow waves make as they break and dissipate. Break, and dissipate.

A propeller plane. The grey outline of a container ship on the horizon. Sailing away. Under full steam, out into the North Sea.  With each new wave, its grey box-like outline shrinks, and recedes. A giant hulk, no bigger than a fingertip. A few waves more, until it dips out of sight.

A fair April day has dawned up in the hills above the village of Kerry. Nothing's come or gone yet along the road beside the stream. Nature's curfew means its dew tinted tarmac must stay empty for a little while longer, to let the stream have its say and give the scattered strands of meadow grass a chance to be blown back into the hedgerows. Silently and invisibly to the ear, the road waits, winding down into the valley through woods and open fields, almost all of the way. Intertwined and accompanied by the music of the stream.

Up here in the hills, the air is cool and pristine fresh. Soon the morning sun will have lifted away the last of the night's chill. A distant cockerel crows amongst birds in full song. Their sonorous voices ring out over the landscape, pure, unfettered by human noise. One flies down to the stream. Tiny wings beat the air. Then gone, quick as a dart. A short creaky call echoes. A roaming pheasant, sounding like an unoiled garden gate. When near the sheer effort can be heard to judder the air.

The stream runs steadily, hidden out of sight along the bottom of a steep brambled gully about ten feet below the level of the road. This section is thickly wooded with weather beaten trees. Far from habitation and almost knee-deep with leaf litter, it's a safe home to birds and ground living wildlife, and a wonderful place to experience the sound of the landscape.

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This is the fourth episode from this lovely spot near the Kerry Ridgeway. Explore them all via this blog post. 

There's a special feeling that comes with the sound of falling rain. With a sky still free of jet planes, this is how the day unfolds within the secret space of the derelict chapel of Abney Park. It is first thing in the morning, when the birds begin to sing and the trees change from dark shadow into green.

Set within dense woodland in the north east of London, barred and padlocked against vandals, this architecturally significant chapel hollowed out by fire thirty years ago, now stands on the cusp of restoration. It's a dissenting gothic structure that aligns and appreciates the natural landscape, and whose 120 foot spire, still visible above the veteran pines, signifies to all around that below lies an oasis of calm within the city. Since its dereliction, the chapel has witnessed ten thousand dawns. This is just one of them. One glorious section of time captured by a pair of microphones left alone to record inside the chapel, underneath nesting birds.

It must have broken through a mist of spring rain when it came, the dawn, the first light of day. It would have come into a watery sky too, one busy with clouds, but full of blossoming spring and still clean, free of jet planes. The birds will have seen it coming, long before. In fine voice they sing from the mid-distance like in a dream, reflected off so many back garden walls. None in this back garden though, with its wide hanging tarpaulin, tumbled stacks of empty flowerpots, upturned planters, and old paint tins. The timpani, for when the rain drops fall.

They know what they're doing, the birds. They watch the rain clouds from their sheltered perches and wait for them to pass. They wait for the water to soak into the grass, and bring up the worms. They bide their time.

As they wait, the city hums, quietly. It isn't quite ready yet. The rain showers down, in fine mists and spray. It falls between the birdsong onto the tarpaulin, onto the upturned pots, the countless leaves and blades of grass. And as it lands, it lights up the garden, in sound. Plays upon the upturned pots and tins, taps like a million fingertips on the tarpaulin, gathers, then with a lifting wind streams off onto the yard floor in splatters. This is how a little garden sounds at dawn, when the rain falls. When there's no one around to hear it.

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