The photos for my walk this week span the two weeks we spent on holiday in Scotland at the end of September. One of the best things about the place we stay in Galloway is the sunsets and arriving late in the day it was one of the first things we enjoyed.
My walk this week takes place in Scotland. While on holiday there in the south west, we took a day trip to Edinburgh and returned via The Helix Park at Falkirk to see The Kelpies for ourselves, but more on them later in the week.
It is about 35 years since I was last in Edinburgh despite having been born there. It was a 2.5 hour drive to get there and we didn’t want to spoil things by trying to do too much. So we decided on two venues close together and a short walk in the city centre. The venues were both the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Modern One and Modern Two.
Modern 2 – the main exhibition was of drawing by Joseph Beuys, a very interesting show but it was essential to read all the accompanying notes in order to have any understanding of the work itself and how it related to his performance art. The museum itself is what my photos below focus on and it, too, was a fascinating place though with low light levels and a warm day, it felt rather stuffy and claustrophobic.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 2 – Stairwell Project by Richard Wright
My walk this week features two different suburban woodlands which are very close to each other and through which I have not walked for a number of years. They have developed in the meantime.
The woods are in Stainton, on the outskirts of Middlesbrough in the north east of England. As with any conurbation there was the constant background sound of traffic but as the woods edge farm fields, there was also the thrum of a tractor engine throughout my walk. Neither of these things detracted from the sound of the birds oe my footsteps on the varying surfaces of the woodland. You may gather from this that my walk this week does have some sound clips to accompany the images and a short soundscape at the the end of the week.
All photographs and sound clips throughout my walk this week were made using my iPhone 6s.
Stainton Woods
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I have been off the grid, so to speak, for a couple of weeks while away on holiday in Scotland but our journey there took in a couple of other destinations in the North East of England. We delivered some of Julie’s work (Julie Brunskill – Ceramics) to the Kunsthuis Gallery in Crayke just north of York and discovered at the same time that Kunsthuis also has a nice cafe and gardens to explore. So my walk this week is a short tour around the place. I’m afraid there are no sound clips with this walk so you will have to imagine the north eastern English countryside sounds.
Follow my posts through the week to see some of the plants, structures and art work in the Kunsthuis Gallery Gardens.
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My walk this week’s actually taken a couple of years ago but as I am going to be in the same area again over the next week or two, it seemed a good time to post about our visit to the chambered tomb of Cairnholy in Scotland. I don’t have any field recording from this walk so I am afraid there will be no soundscape this week.
The weather on this walk could have been better but was not so bad to stop us going and the walk up the small road towards the ancient site was very attractive in itself.
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My walk this week is from Nash Point on the South Wales coast. It is a place that holds memories for me, not least of which is a schools / RNLI project I did with HyperAction some years ago – “Launch the Lifeboats, Stories of Wreck and Rescue in the Bristol Channel”. Other memories are of the cliff lined, wave platform shoreline between Nash Point and Monknash where I produced the StillWalks video “Breakers Walk” for CARIAD, the research unit at Cardiff Metropolitan University.
The lighthouse, its foghorn (no longer used but listen below) and the cliffs with the wave platform at their foot makes this a truly amazing place.
Nash Point Lighthouse
It was pretty windy when we were there and I did not get much done in the way of field recording. – that is not what we were there for. I didn’t even take my camera so all photography for my walk this week was done on my iPhone.
I recorded the clip below on the “Lifeboats” project and you will be able to hear the wind between the blasts of the fog horn if you are not too blown away by the horn itself!
Nash Point Fog Horn
Nash Point Fog Horn
Monkfish Cliffs
On this first day of my walk this week the mountain mist does not come down to this level – the sun was even shining at times. I had hoped for reasonable weather for my StillWalks production walk up Mynydd Rugog, a mountain just south of Cadair Idris and overlooking Tal-y-Llyn in the mountains north of Aberystwyth in Wales.
A style of gate
There had been a lot of rain over the previous couple of days and the rivers running through the forest were in spate.
Mountain Woodland Wind and Water
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My walk this weak is in Swansea Bay on the beach in front of Crymlin Burrows and Swansea Uni Bay Campus will reveal what may be turning into an obsession with sand.
The tide was as far out as I have ever seen it and as I stood in the middle of its seemingly vast expanse and turned around the full 360 degrees I could see that the sand in this part of the bay is much more sculpted by the tide than it is in front of the city itself. This is not revealed much in these panoramic shots but I will post some of the patterns created in the sand through the week.
The soundscape of the beach is quite different to the wild blast of wind blowing on Colwyn Bay in my walk last week. Listen below to the ambience with the occasional distant sound of birds or voices from a small group of people and the faint backdrop of traffic.
Swansea Bay Ambience
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