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.
Down at the marina on a weekday in August
Suffolk Wood (part 9) - the hour before dawn with owls and nocturnal animals
82 Hill top oak in strong wind - a natural source of white noise (sleep safe)
Rising tide in the rock garden - the sea wall near Bradwell-on-Sea
A doze in the grass on Wallasea Island (High-def sound and sleep safe)
Essence of estuary
78 The birds that sing on the cusp of night - a leafy ravine in the Peak District (sleep safe after 16 mins)
77 The cuckoo of Swanscombe Marsh
Last pasture before the sea - Winchelsea to Rye
75 Yacht masts on the estuary at Wrabness (part 1)
74 Night shallowing in a Suffolk Wood - listen with headphones (sleep safe)
Slow rhythms of the Hoo Peninsula
The tunnel, the towpath and the window - under the M6 at Spaghetti Junction
Wading cows and a passing cuckoo - the lakes and woodland of Chatsworth
70 - Blue sky. Empty beach. Low tide.
Time beside a stream in the Welsh hills
Birdsong in rain from inside the derelict chapel at Abney Park nature reserve
May rain after daybreak
Listening to the longshore drift
65 Songs from the churchyard of St Mary’s Gilston
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