Last pasture before the sea – Winchelsea to Rye

Full Episode description

Our first really clear sound-view of the landscape came along a footpath a mile or so from Winchelsea station, with the A259 behind us and, according to the map at least, the open sea ahead. It was in all its peaceful wideness, its pastoral mildness, there to be heard, from inside a little outcrop of blackthorn trees. Every branch covered in the healthiest grey lichen we’d ever seen. Blossom just starting to appear. We named it lichen thicket. 

The land from Winchelsea to Rye is not only pleasantly low lying and bucolic, but the last before the shingle. We walked it before the summer came through all the new bright green, under a changeable April sky, under the thin calls of distant seagulls and passing geese. Hot sun shone between banks of fast moving cloud. Fresh breezes blew, they smelled at first of luscious hedgerows, then as we got closer, of the salty tidal zone.

A see-sawing great tit watched as we set up the microphones. Then as we scuffed away down the stony path, we heard the tumbling song of a chaffinch. Time begins to pass, pushed along by a gentle wind. Some falling drops of honey: a willow warbler. Distant activity on a farm. Yard dogs barking, rooks surveying the ground. Amidst the long quiet, two propeller planes pass, one behind the other.