131 A thousand years along the Creel Path

A straight and stony path heads through open country, towards the sea. Beside the track, amongst land in-between, a tree. Lone and leafy. Like a sentry. Exposed and standing. It watches the sea birds. Hears their wide and freeing calls. Feels summer gusts of salty air. And listens, to a distant thrum. A vessel. At sea. Slowly passing.

It's daytime. Rain clouds are moving overhead. Loose stones lie along the narrow track, wettening, and darkening, and waiting, for the first feet of the day. In the hedgerow, the tall grasses wave on the edge of golden fields with sculptured hay bales resting. Sheep graze. Jackdaws fly, against a slender band of ocean grey. Time passes. From within the tree, raindrops are landing amongst broad green leaves.

This is how the world sounds from the Creel Path, a track that runs from Coldingham to St Abbs on the east coast of Scotland. The route has a history going back a thousand years. In bygone times, fishermen used it to trudge to their gruelling work. We left the microphones alone to record in the only useful tree we could find on this stretch of the path. It looked out towards the sea, about a quarter of a mile away. The same view for 1000 years.