This is a segment of time from a clearing deep in the Forest of Dean. Echoing birds in full voice. Soft hushing breezes in high treetops. Then, over time, a band of fresh summer rain, falling in rich spatial detail over countless broad-leaved trees. It's a natural environment. The sort of place people travel to, to get away from it all. To get a dose of green health, because it ticks all the boxes. It's remote. Proper countryside. Far away from major roads and industrialised, built-up areas. So, a place where unnatural noise should be almost non-existent.
To get here we travelled several hundred miles by train with our audio equipment, staying in the Gloucestershire town of Lydney. We covered the last five miles on foot. We found the same tree we recorded from back in 2019 and set our mics beside it to record on their longest mission so far.
Hooked up to a huge battery, we left them alone to record non-stop over a four-day period. We imagined how we'd capture the sounds of woodcock on their twilight roding flights. Owls hooting in the dead of night. Brilliantly songful dawn choruses. Hours of pure birdsong in the warm daylight. All pure and free of human-made noise.
We have managed to capture these amazing sounds, but what's also revealed is just how much human-made noise there is too. We've not been able to find natural daytime quiet lasting for more than about 15 minutes. From aircraft to the exhaust sounds of motorbikes and other motor transport, the sound-feel of the forest is strongly shaped by unnatural things.
The natural environment is recognised as vitally important to our health and wellbeing, but it's highly permeable to unnatural noise which can carry over many miles.
Its effect on the experience of being within nature can be heard in this episode, particularly over the first five minutes. It shows how just one passing motorbike becomes the main sound feature of the forest for a significant portion of time. How the number of journeys that people make, in that area and the design of the machines they use, combine over time to interrupt and break up the forest's own natural sound presence.
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
Summer sunrise over a lake in the Lee Valley - raucous birds start the day
Murmurs of the Kerry Ridgeway (part 2) - what rush hour sounds like in the hills of mid-Wales
Arable farmland in the Essex countryside
Suffolk Wood (part 4) - 11pm
A summer walk in rural Hertfordshire - sunshine and showers
Cathedral of trees - the Forest of Dean (part 1)
Early summer breezes
Sound-scenes of ocean waves
Suffolk Wood (part 3) - 10pm
Murmurs of the Kerry Ridgeway
Murmurs of the Kerry Ridgeway
Sleeper train from Paris Austerlitz to Port Bou
Under a large umbrella (rain and thunder)
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