Last day of August. Pleasant sunshine, blue sky. Wind 1 to 2 knots, barely noticeable. Standing tall with motionless leaves, the trees are leaning into the warmth, letting their limbs soak up every available ounce of the sun's golden heat. Along the old bridleway, away from the grey noise of a cross-country road, quiet fields are revealed. Knee deep with grass. Waiting to be mown.
A hedgerow, beside a field. All around, the air thrums, with a feeling of wide open space. In the mid-distance, a flock of geese, slowly transiting the open sky. From near in a high tree, a rook calls. It echoes over the fields, a dry bark-like caw that spells the arrival of autumn.
In the next field, hidden from view behind a line of trees, a tractor pulls a long wheeled and bladed contraption up and down. It's mowing the summer's grass. Time to make hay. An old propeller plane hums proudly over. It's passage draws a slow, arching line, between the eastern and western skies.
Gradually, with nobody around, the birds return. Magpies, to bully in the high top branches. The tchack tchacks, of scattering jackdaws. A pheasant, its creaky call like an unoiled gate somewhere in the undergrowth. Little birds, perched amongst the brambles, emit short, percussive sounds. The tractor continues to mow. More planes traverse the sky. And all the time, from everywhere and nowhere, the air continues to thrum with tiny, silken vibrations. These are the traces, the most elemental of aural fragments, the leftovers gathered at the edges of human hearing from the action of countless rolling tyres on fast asphalt roads, but that from here, filtered through so many trees and hedgerows, are safely and forgettably muffled beneath the horizon.
42 Night beside a stream in Wales (sleep safe)
Gulls at low tide along the River Thames
Low tide on the Thames Estuary at Benfleet creek (no loud noises and best with headphones)
Jackdaws and flooded winterbournes - watery emptiness
Tawny echoes in the cathedral of trees (sleep safe)
Rain in Abney Park
Wind over the Bridgemarsh Marina on the Dengie Peninsula
Suffolk Wood part 5 - the hour to 1am (sleep safe)
Wind on water under an equinoctial sky - on the Dengie peninsula Essex
Champagne shingle on Felixstowe beach
Folkestone Warren - Spitfire flypast then coastal murmurings
31 Late summer heat bathing under splendid trees - peace in the Clinton-Baker Pinetum
30 Wind and time passes in the Forest of Dean
Trains, planes and estuary birds
Night rain falls on a Peak District moorside
Dead of night beside a lake in the Lee Valley Park - sleep special
August breezes through an ancient Oak
Cooling off beside sifting waves at Felixstowe Ferry
Peace beside the tidal Thames near Stanford-le-Hope in the county of Essex
Brutalism and crickets of the A10 flyover
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