Hugh Huddy
Radio Lento
Not specifically for children, but each episode features a lovely landscape sound postcards in 3D immersive sound. Best with earphones. Listen while reading, resting or being mindful.
Go to episode one
There are 249 episodes
Episode One: Episode 1 – Suffolk wood at 6am
This is an Episodic show. You can listen to it in any order, but episode one is always a great place to start.
About
Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started: March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 249 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
Link to this Podcast
<a href="https://soundcarrot.com/shows/shows/radio-lento/page/26/" title="SoundCarrot.com - Children's podcasts"><img src="https://soundcarrot.com/img/sc-sm.png" alt="Listen On SoundCarrot" style="width: 200px; height: auto" /></a>Creators website
Hugh Huddy
Content, Artwork and advertising within this podcast is not owned or affiliated with Sound Carrot.
Hugh Huddy
Content, Artwork and advertising within this podcast is not owned or affiliated with Sound Carrot.
Episodes
Suffolk Wood (part 6) – 1am to 2am sleep safe with owls
01:05:55 | Episode: 49 | January 9th, 2021
All is still in the wood. It is mid-way through a barmy August night. There is no breeze to rustle the trees. Dark bush crickets trichit the passage of time on crickle-dry carpets of leaves. Carried clear over the surrounding fields, the bell of Saint Mary’s church chimes one. It’s this time, in between the small hours, when the landscape is farthest from light, that the balance between what is near and what is distant shifts and blurs. Cows low. Geese and ducks fly high overhead. The nocturnal noise of the distant A12 has thinned, become a panoramic drape around the wood sharpening what’s heard within. Echoes. Of owls. Far off. They’re on the other side. Dead branches drop. Thump the hollow ground from where a hidden creature silently emerges to nibble at leaves. Then, they come. The Tawnies. A male and a female, maybe more. They land on high treetop boughs. Cast trembling calls. Haunt the breezeless voids. Time passes. The wood rests. The clock strikes 2.
Abney Park on Christmas Day in the morning
58:07 | Episode: 48 | January 2nd, 2021
Through the bare limbed trees of Abney Park nature reserve in Hackney, London a song thrush sings sweetly. It’s first light. The air and the microphones are frozen, left behind through a long night and its icy winds. Ivy hangs still, above the lion on the tomb. Abney Park is both a nature reserve and one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries. It’s early, silky quiet. The park hasn’t opened yet. The derelict chapel is an angular shadow beneath leafless trees. Footpaths lie empty, gravestones unread. Everything’s waiting for the people to appear. Bathed in the soft city rumble, the softest it can be, the rooks see the light and caw from the treetops. Wood pigeons wake up. Robins stationed on branches one, two, three, brightly twistle strong melodies, mark their territories, all puffed up against the cold. Seagulls wheel in the wide open above the wood, and a sparse few planes rumble by, long haulers coming in, they must be, this being Christmas Day. With the gathering light comes the dazzling spacious song of wrens. A woodpecker. A fleeting murmur of passing geese. A hint of a breeze, a moment of shift in the ivy. And then of alerting birds and far off the sounds of people, a family, happy children and their dog. The first in. The first through the gate. The first to breathe the pure crisp air of Abney Park, on this fast brightening Christmas Day of 2020. [This episode was produced in collaboration with the Abney Park Cemetery Trust.]
Quiet field by Young Wood
36:28 | Episode: 47 | December 26th, 2020
It took several miles, over claggy east Hertfordshire footpaths and a waterlogged bridleway, to find a quiet field. A peaceful spot where the susurrations of the natural landscape outweigh that of the distant A10. To break our winter walk, we came off the bridleway and followed a babbling brook into a spindly thicket, where we left the microphones alone to record. The water’s running steady. Rilling over dark stones, flowing in and out of small pools hidden under grass, from where a bit of bobbing wood spins and softly knocks. Above small birds flutter and chitter in the leafless trees and far off, seagulls. An old Land Rover splashes its way down the empty puddled lane. A lofty buzzard circles and droops its whistling call high over the nearby wood. Behind tails of wood smoke, jagged shapes of crows, leap and caw between the trees. Somewhere deep in Young Wood, a pheasant creaks. It’s waiting for the dusk.
Derbyshire gales blow away the cobwebs
50:41 | Episode: 46 | December 19th, 2020
It is one of those bright-skied days when the clouds are moving faster than they should and you can hear the weight of the trees. A gale is sweeping the moorside, clearing down the dead wood. Sheltered inside an outcrop of trees, everything’s in motion. What’s loose is up and swirling, what’s tethered bobs and waves. Banks of wind surge, roaring through the high treetops, bending hundred ton trunks that in turn lean, and straighten. Eddies are whirling down through the foliage, lifting tangled vines and rustling crisp leaves. Beyond the wood, sheep stoically graze, knee-deep in green grass. They’re overseen by the cockerel crowing hard to be heard. Chickens poke and cluck over the rough ground by the farmhouse. Its roof appears and disappears behind rocking boughs. A tractor chugs by on the lane, its smoke dragged out flat from the chimney. Birds come and go, twittering and calling, unperturbed by the wind. Hill walkers clink a distant gate. Time to take it all in. To fill one’s lungs and let a Derbyshire gale blow away the cobwebs.
Night rain falls on a Peak District moorside (part 2 – sleep safe)
42:23 | Episode: 45 | December 12th, 2020
It’s the early hours of the morning. Shrouded under dark sky and cloud, the rain’s falling heavily on the moor above the Whaley Bridge reservoir. It’s dowsing the trees in this small wood, pouring and scattering through the waxy June leaves, filling the air with a springly spray of refreshing sound. The sheep and the lambs are asleep. The farmhouse over the field is a murky shadow beneath a haze of yesterday’s wood smoke. The cockerel, the chickens and the dogs are silent. Only owls are there, somewhere in the inky dark, far echoes from another wood. It’s a Derbyshire landscape, all hills and fields with gritstone walls and slopes that end in valleys. Time passes. The rain falls. And as it slowly eases to a patter and the last jets have ploughed their lazy ways down into Ringway airport, the owl comes close. Almost incredibly to a tree near where we left the microphones. A tawny owl, calling for its mate. It just appears. Its wings make no sound.
Bucolic contrasts under low cloud – the land between Sandy and St Neots
31:08 | Episode: 44 | December 5th, 2020
Tingling droplets still hanging in the air from the clearing mist, with not much daylight left, we finally managed to find a place to record. A lonely outcrop of oak trees beside the trackway, with a clear view of the surrounding landscape. Magpies circling. The spot had an interesting feel to it. We found later that the track dated back to the Iron Age and then became a roman road. Half a mile back down the track we stumbled upon a long overgrown airfield, a barn in a cluster of trees containing a memorial to the people stationed there. During WWII it was known as RAF Tempsford. Covert missions were deployed into occupied France. Now, from this little outcrop of trees, the air is ringing under low cloud with the sounds of today’s bucolic contrasts. Of sounds near and far. Of harsh tchacking magpies and distantly mellifluous starlings. Of a loud croaky wood pigeon at roost in the tree, and of a pheasant making its creaky calls as it roams the nearby field. Of trains skimming the horizon on the mainline from London to Peterborough. And of a noisy farm vehicle as it rattles and splashes and bumps right past the microphones on the puddled trackway. Then by again. Grittily tracing its way back to the far field whence it came. It’s a late November day, less than an hour to sunset. There’s a horse, echoes of bird scarers from across the fields, and still a bee, buzzing by left to right between the leaf-bare trees. One for sorrow two for joy, three for a girl four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told.
43 Tidal water mirror still – a sound view from Canvey Island
31:19 | Episode: 43 | November 28th, 2020
A bird calls out. Its cry carries far out over the water on this, a rare day of no wind. Not even a breeze or a whisper of leaves in the trees. Cows low from farmland on the floodplain beside the Thames Estuary. From a hidden nest, little birds flutter in and out. What planes there are pass softly, almost inaudibly, but just enough to reveal the vastness of the bright afternoon sky. It’s hanging on, the light, longer for a late November day. Away from the footpath down a thick grassy slope we found the water, at rest between the tides. Shallow over boot stealing mud, it was mirroring the sky. A corner within the landscape of visceral stillness. Tiny bubbles are popping on the surface of the water. Almost too delicate to hear. We lower the tripod to get the microphones closer, then carry on with our walk to let them record alone. To the keen ear, murmurs waft in from out over the estuary of curlew, avocet and geese. Crows caw. A horse neighs. The air vibrates. This isn’t just a pastoral landscape beside a wild estuary, it is edgeland too. On the western horizon, three perhaps four miles distant are tall cranes at work shifting containers. They place and drop, each makes a gentle roll of thunder. It’s the London Gateway Port. The still water bubbles and pops. The little birds flutter back. Walkers clink the gate up by the field but this spot is well hidden from view. And what was that? Something plopped into the water. Or jumped out of it? Who knows, there was no one here to see.
42 Night beside a stream in Wales (sleep safe)
01:00:00 | Episode: 42 | November 21st, 2020
Up in the hills about three miles from the mid-Wales village of Ceri, there’s a stream. It runs down into the valley mostly parallel to a road. The landscape is largely uninhabited. It’s a very peaceful spot. To make this recording we had to push through thick brambles and climb down into a dell where the stream flows bright and shallow over worn stones. Sheltered within steep banks ankle-deep with dry leaves and beneath budding trees, the stream flows with a crystal clear clarity. We left the microphones to record overnight (see also episodes 13 and 21). This is the hour from about 3 to 4am. All the birds are asleep, except for a pair of tawny owls that can be heard calling to each other at the beginning. Cars occasionally pass up on the road in front, a reminder that there is an outside world beyond the perfect stillness that exists within this hidden dell. It is rare to have captured the sound of nothing happening.
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Created by: Hugh Huddy
Started:
March 29th, 2020
Status: Active, 249 episodes
Kind: Episodic
Language: English
This is just so relaxing to listen to.