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.
65 Songs from the churchyard of St Mary’s Gilston
Waiting for skylarks at the Rye Harbour nature reserve
Taking forty winks at the seaside - Norman's Bay, East Sussex (sleep safe)
Mistle thrush sings amongst wind hushing conifers
A city at low tide (sleep safe)
Soundscenes of spring from the Derbyshire hills
A fallen tree on Galley Hill
Suffolk Wood (part 7) 2am - counting the chirps of a dark bush cricket (sleep safe)
Seaside brutalism - at the Port of Felixstowe
56 The whispering trees of Bayford Wood
Light rain beside the lane near Sandy
Sound-scenes of Norman's Pond as dusk turns to night - sleep safe
After the dawn chorus in the Forest of Dean
52 The balm of warm woodland in late summer
Garden birds under a silent sky
50 Singing beck below Black Hill (sleep safe)
Suffolk Wood (part 6) - 1am to 2am sleep safe with owls
Abney Park on Christmas Day in the morning
Quiet field by Young Wood
Derbyshire gales blow away the cobwebs
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