This is Martyn Stewart… with a life in sound from The Listening Planet.
Recently I returned to England. Home. The place where everything began.
But this time the journey was different.
Someone had recommended me for an honour… an OBE. The Order of the British Empire. When I first heard the words, I honestly could not take it in. I kept thinking there must be some mistake. Awards like that are for extraordinary people, not a lad from a Birmingham council estate who spent his life wandering through woods with a tape recorder.
Yet there I was, driving toward Windsor Castle.
We actually got a bit lost on the way. My niece Amanda was navigating, and we ended up turning down a grand drive that definitely did not belong to us. But as we finally found the road to the castle gates, another car pulled in ahead of us.
David Beckham.
And I remember thinking, well… this day is already surreal.
What we did not know until we arrived at the gates was that the medal would be presented by the King himself.
Walking into Windsor Castle is like stepping into history. The stone walls, the guards, the quiet sense of ceremony that hangs in the air. When the moment came, I stepped forward and there he was, elevated slightly on the stage as tradition demands.
The King smiled, spoke kindly, and pinned the medal to my lapel.
And I remember thinking, how on earth did a boy who used to disappear into the woods with a microphone end up here?
The strange thing is, the whole story nearly never happened.
Months earlier I received a phone call from a number I did not recognise. These days I ignore most unknown calls because they are usually spam. But this one I answered.
A British voice came down the line.
“Hello, my name is Rufus Drabble. I’m calling regarding some documents we need you to sign.”
I stopped him immediately.
“Mate,” I said, “you’re not getting access to my bank account.”
He patiently explained he was an officer of the British realm calling from Miami. I told him that meant absolutely nothing. Anyone could invent a name and say the same thing.
To be honest… I practically told him to Fuck off
A little later another call came from New York. Then an email with official looking paperwork. I still thought it was a scam. So I did what many people do these days.
I asked ChatGPT.
It told me there was a very high chance the message was genuine.
Still, I was not convinced.
Then the palace called my niece Amanda.
“Would you mind ringing your uncle,” they asked her. “He thinks the honour is a scam.”
Only then did I realise it was real.
But receiving an honour for nature feels strange to me. There are so many people who have dedicated their lives to protecting wildlife. I have simply spent my life listening to it.
And when I return to England… that is where the story truly begins.
Because England is where I first learned to listen.
When I close my eyes and think about home, I hear the dawn chorus.
Long before the sun rises, a single voice begins. Usually the robin. Soft and thoughtful, singing in the half light before morning truly arrives.
Then the wren joins in. Small bird, enormous voice.
Soon the choir begins to build.
Blackbirds, song thrushes, nuthatches, rooks and crows. One after another they enter the orchestra until the countryside is alive with sound.
When I was a boy there were three and a half billion people on the planet. Less than half of what there are today. The world sounded different then.
But there are still fragments of that past.
When I visit places like the Cotswolds in spring, the dawn chorus still has that ancient quality. As if you are hearing something that has echoed through centuries.
It reminds me of something I realised recently.
I built a time machine.
Not one made of flashing lights and blue boxes like Doctor Who. Mine is made of microphones, tapes, and hard drives.
My recordings allow me to travel back sixty years.
When I play them, I can see the landscapes exactly as they were. The fields, the woods, the hedgerows. The world as a boy once experienced it.
One of those places was a bluebell wood across the road from my childhood home.
To reach it you crossed a road, walked through open fields, passed a hedgerow, then another field… and suddenly you were inside a cathedral of trees.
The woods were my sanctuary.
If there were arguments at home, if life felt unsettled, I would disappear there with my recorder.
The woods listened to me.
Years later I asked the sound recordist Alice Boyd to revisit that place. She returned fifty years later… on the same day, at the same time in the morning.
But when she arrived something had changed.
The fields were gone.
A housing estate now surrounded the bluebell wood.
When she played the recordings back to me, I could barely speak.
Cars. Doors slamming. Dogs barking. Aircraft overhead.
The birds were still there, but their orchestra had been drowned by the noise of our modern world.
And yet in my archive… the old sound still lives.
Because sound truly does tell a thousand pictures.
Close your eyes and step with me into those woods.
As you walk through the fields you hear the wind brushing against the barley. Insects whisper through the grass. Leaves crackle beneath your feet.
Then a bird calls.
Suddenly the entire forest responds.
A blackbird raises the alarm. Somewhere a fox shifts in the undergrowth. A hedgehog rustles through the leaves.
Nature is constantly speaking.
We have simply forgotten how to listen.
As I grew older I began travelling further across England with my tape recorder. I bought my first Nagra recorder when I was nineteen and suddenly the world of sound opened up.
Every landscape had its own signature.
A meadow sounded different from a forest. Marshlands sounded different from farmland. Rivers changed everything.
In places like the Wyre Forest I heard water running through woodland, mixing with birdsong in ways I had never experienced before.
In Cannock Chase I recorded nightjars for the first time.
Across the Peak District the soundscape changed again. Wide open grasslands, wind sweeping across the hills, and the haunting cry of the curlew.
That call… long, mournful, almost ancient.
When I hear it I imagine centuries of history echoing across the landscape.
Further south in the Wye Valley I encountered kingfishers and dippers. The dipper is a wonderful indicator species. If you hear one along a river, it usually means the water is healthy.
When I was young, rivers across England were alive with them.
Another place that left a deep impression on me was the Norfolk Broads. A network of quiet rivers and canals stretching through East Anglia.
There I heard a sound unlike anything I had encountered before.
The bittern.
A deep, booming call that rolls across the marsh like distant thunder.
At the time bitterns were disappearing from Britain. Their numbers had collapsed and many feared they might vanish completely.
But when Alice Boyd returned to the Broads decades later… she found something remarkable.
The bitterns had returned.
Sometimes nature can still surprise us.
And so our journey across England ends, for now.
From bluebell woods to the Peak District… from the Wye Valley to the Norfolk marshes.
Every place with its own orchestra.
But if you ask me which sound feels most like home… there is really only one answer.
The blackbird.
That rich, liquid song drifting across hedgerows at dawn.
Sometimes the skylark challenges it from the open fields above, pouring music down from the sky.
But somewhere in the hedgerow… a blackbird is always singing.
And for me, that will always be the sound of England.
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