Quiet Burrow 005

Last year my eldest daughter Isla and I started making a quarterly radio show called the Quiet Burrow. Isla is 7 years old and enjoys art, nature and learning. So we use our shows to get creative, based loosely around the central theme of Ambient music.

Isla has been drawn to the woods for some time and had been asking if we could visit. I'd promised we'd get up early one morning and head out. She remembers when she was a toddler and we took her sister Emily for a walk with the pram, and how the wheels got stuck in bog-like muddy puddles. She found it hilarious. We also pass the woods many times whenever we drive out of the village. There's only one road out, and you can see the lines of trees in the distance - a beautiful sight.

So for this episode, Isla and I headed off to the woods, armed with my iPhone for photos and a Zoom H5 handy recorder, with a shotgun mic and windshield. We spent just over an hour recording and racked up almost 8000 steps! This show is all about nature, and so for the music, we selected tracks that link to nature - particularly those with a woodland theme. You can learn all about our adventures and see our photos via the blog post below.

Hit play on the Mixcloud player below to listen to the show, which once again features cover artwork from photographer Bob Burnett, as he's done for each of the shows so far.

We hope you enjoy the show...

Tracklist

01 Bowing - The Meadows
02 Andrew Heath - Let me see Trees Again
03 Erland Cooper - Music for Growing Flowers - Pt. 2
04 Ida Urd & Ingri Høyland - Nest
05 Valotihkuu - Awakening of the Forest
06 Wil Bolton - Sun Tree Trail
07 The Green Kingdom - Woodland Diorama

EVIDENCE

We got up early, before light, and had some breakfast together. Then we took a brief car journey down the road to the next village and after a short walk through a field, we hit the woods. It's been raining so much here lately, and we knew we were likely to encounter boggy conditions. The streams were alive with water and we stopped to record the running water at a few stages. The sound of the water up close was loud, and I showed Isla that sometimes it's best to take a few paces back so it feels more like a trickle. We spotted something interesting the other side of the stream; the hedgerows had gaps at the bottom in places, and below these gaps, there was bare mud rather than grass, weeds and undergrowth. We surmised that it must have been creatures such as rabbits or small muntjac deer climbing back up the bank. Or as Isla puts it - perhaps they slid down! I told Isla we'd hopefully see some animals on our walk but to begin with, we were looking for evidence. We found some footprints and some dung...signs of life.

DEER

Not long after we'd been chatting about evidence, we got to some tall pine trees and at the bottom, we realised suddenly that just the other side of the stream was a herd of deer! As is always the case, as soon as I realised and reached for my phone to take a picture, they were off scarpering. You can just about make out a few from the herd in this picture, looking at us from a safe distance. Isla was in awe and we stood for a few moments looking at them. We could have stayed there for a lot longer, but we'd barely entered the woods so decided to press on. Later, we'd spot another herd - or perhaps the same one...

SQUIRRELS?

We headed deeper into the woods and I started to recognise some of it from many years back, when I used to explore it not long after I'd discovered Ambient music. We passed the main path north and continued on. I wondered if we might be heading to a special view I used to be very fond of. We veered off the path onto a stretch of area covered in bracken, twigs and the last of the autumn leaves. We saw some huge mushrooms near some fallen, rotting trees and here, you can see what Isla called a squirrel plate! It was a tree stump, covered in nut shells and we presumed, this was perhaps where some squirrels had a feast. We stood for a few minutes until the birds piped up and we captured a field recording.

UP THE HILL

As we surged ahead through the woods, we noticed that walking was becoming more difficult than before. There were lots of things to watch out for on the ground; hidden holes, stumps, brambles and fallen branches. But also, our walk was getting steeper. I wondered if we were getting close to a view I used to head for back on my old walks, nearly 20 years ago. The edge of the woods sits on a hill looking out to a village called Edenham and you can see for miles. I'd often looked back at the woods from the village when driving, remembering how nice it was to get through the woods and look down from its relatively small summit. I thought how nice it would be to return nearly 2 decades later, with Isla. We could see more daylight as we pushed on and I hoped to be able to show Isla the view from the other side.

PHOTO FINISH

We managed to reach the destination, and you can see the view in this blog's header image. It wasn't exactly where I had in mind and was either a little more north, or south - but, I could see the chicken farm right in front of us, where the footpath takes you into the village. We were in the right spot. We stood and admired the view for a while and Isla was enjoying taking it in. I told her the story about how I'd walk through the woods listening to Ambient music on my old iPod classic, the year I got into the genre. But of course, she'd heard it all before and I don't think she was listening... Instead, she'd spotted another herd of deer off in the field below us. They were too far away to capture a photo worth showing here - but we could make out that one was much lighter, almost white. On the way back, we took more photos and field recordings - and at one stage, a pheasant lurking in the undergrowth took off. I love the sound of their wings expanding and the noise they make taking off. We caught it on the Zoom H5. As well as field recording, Isla helped me take some of the photos too - here's one of her favourites from the day. A fallen tree and presumably recent, as the rust coloured autumn leaves had not fallen. Back at home, we edited the photos together, adjusting the colours, adding the borders and getting the crop right. We'd taken some great shots together but I let Isla choose which ones to feature in the blog.

Isla will be back in the summer with the next episode of Quiet Burrow, so stay tuned! We've got an idea or two lines up, and Bob has already sent us another bunny for the mix cover...