238 Harvest fields aside The Peddars Way (100th location)

Full Episode description

On the breeze, rich scents of hot Norfolk farmland. In the air, tiny wippling birds. Some swallows? Across the field, and across the next, a combine harvester large as a house. And quick as a car. It sails low over the far meadow, like a paddle steamer on a bright green sea.

Standing on the Peddars Way, Lento box in hand, we’ve stopped to take in the heat, and to listen. Wide carpets of crickets are cricketing all around the meadow grass. They’re happy. Baking like us, under a hot midday sun. We search for a tree. For a natural tripod. We scan the thickets that line this ancient route. It is quite a silent process, and the box swings gently. It’s waiting for us to find it a good spot.

The spot it needs is specific. An aural point in the landscape where everything meaningful can not just be heard but heard in a spatially balanced way. An aural meeting point where the box will “see” the whole landscape as a sound photograph. Eventually we find a very old oak tree completely covered in hairlike moss. It’s amazing. Very carefully we rest the box between two intersecting boughs and check how the sound photograph is going to “look” through a pair of stereo headphones. Good we quietly say, providing this breeze doesn’t ruffle the surrounding leaves too much. The weather seems fair and stable, so we leave the box to record alone. 

* We captured this sound-scene (our 100th unique location and 25th county) on Norfolk farmland on a hot July day. The old oak tree stands on the Peddars Way, a 49-mile National Trail which follows the route of a Roman Road. Tiny birds flit and flutter amongst the thickets under the wide sky where rumbles of distant military jets can sometimes be heard. A combine harvester is at work far right of scene. If you’re able to hear high pitched crickets, their sound sometimes wafts in an out too from the meadow. Red kites overhead too. 

Thanks for listening, and to Lento supporters who’ve helped us to bring 100 UK landscape locations in high definition spatial sound to this free podcast service.