Walking Soundscape – Reviewing the Week 45

Sometimes I listen to “Ramblings” on BBC Radio 4. Clare Balding presents the in programme which she meets and converses with various people as part of a countryside walk. She does a good job of describing the scenery they walk through and the talk is always interesting. There is just one failing for me as a radio programme – there are never enough pauses to listen to the environmental sounds of the walk. They are there in the background but constantly over-layered with talk.

I like to listen to all of the sounds I encounter on a walk or in the case of a quiet walk, I like to listen to the lack of sound, the stillness.

The series of sound clips below last about 15 minutes and follow my walk this week. Starting in a Welsh country lane with autumn leaves all around, continuing up a local hill (Cefn Drum) to the cairn at the top and then back down again to the leafy lane. It was a very still and peaceful walk but there are plenty of sounds to listen to along the way.

I like to listen to other field recordists’ soundscapes as well – one I enjoy regularly is set in  Paris (Sound Landscapes) but the sounds of the city are as fascinating to me as those of a natural landscape.

Click the play button below and listen to the soundscape of my walk this week while browsing through the sequence of images. It’s not a StillWalks video but I hope you can relax and enjoy it in the same way.

Autumn footpath

Evidence of Others

On many of the walks I take I rarely see many other people – one or two at most. However, there is always evidence that others walk the same routes. In this case, apart from the fact that the footpath is well trodden anyway, there were cycle tracks, footprints, trampled mushrooms and the hoof prints of horses.

There are almost always the sounds of human activity in the background and this walk was no exception. The sound clip on this post has the sound of farm machinery in the background along with the twitter and caws of birds. The ambient sound is partly made up of the distant motorway but more noticeable is the constant “flicker” of the electricity pylons under which I was standing. And then there is a human/canine encounter as well.

Cefn Drum 4 

Cefn Drum 4

Cefn Drum-27

hoof print

Cefn Drum-26

 

Lonesome Tree Pointing The Way

This is not the first shot I have taken of this tree but that is, perhaps, hardly surprising – it is an obvious subject that, standing out against the skyline, almost begs to photographed.

As I approached the top of the hill my walk seemed directed by the tree which appears from this angle to be pointing the way to the cairn in the distance. On the way back down it also seems to be pointing the way whereas unreality it is just telling us the direction of the prevailing wind.

Cefn Drum 3

Cefn Drum 3

Click on the first thumbnail to view larger and in sequence – you can listen to the sound clip above at the same time. It’s the same clip I posted yesterday but as it represents the same section of the walk I thought it the best one to use.

lone tree

Ghostly Mist and Trees

Looking over my local South Wales landscape during my morning walk to the woods, the dawn light gradually brightens and the mist lying along the river Loughor gives the trees a ghostly appearance.

pre-dawn mist

Hazy Walk and Reviewing the Week 40

Looking at the photos in this week’s morning walk posts, I note the haze as well as the morning sunlight. Yet again in this shot, you cannot see anything of the Gower Peninsula in the background. Taken at the end of the first week of September, perhaps we were due for some rain at the time, just to clear the air a bit.

Loughor estuary landscape

Monochrome Mumbles

For some reason I had the impulse to process this image in sepia tone. Adding a bit of grain, it is given an aged look (as sepia does), as if it were a shot of Swansea Bay from Mumbles taken a century ago. Of course there are a number of tell tale signs that this could not be the case. The most obvious is perhaps the wind turbine.

The image can also be seen on Leanne Cole’s Photography blog and Monochrome Madness 46.

Swansea Bay in sepia

Reviewing the Week

Whether or not you have been looking at the StillWalks blog over the last week, here is a chance to look through the sequence of images that I have posted on the subject (mostly) of the wild, wet and windy weather that can be experienced at this time of year on the Mawr uplands near Swansea in South Wales.

 

Driving Rain

Driving through driving rain is not a pleasant thing to do but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any views worth photographing. I took these shots before setting off on my return journey from the Mawr hills and decided not to do anything with the smudge of rain water on the lens which can be seen to the right of the horizon line.

The weather was bad, the atmosphere gloomy and the landscape dark. The grass on the road verges was perhaps not as dark as is shown in these photos, but the presented atmosphere is certainly accurate to my memory of the scene.

upland road

upland road