192 Remembering summer on the Hoo Peninsula

Radio Lento podcast

The experience of being out in the wide open on Higham Marshes in Kent on a warm May afternoon is nothing short of glorious. It's a perfect location for the Lento mics too. Earlier this year we walked through the nature reserve en-route to the old fort on the Thames and left the Lento box to capture the sound scene of the Higham Marshes nature reserve from a little hawthorn tree in full scented blossom. We shared part of this sound-view in episode 169. Here's the other part of that same recording, kept back until now, for a time we really need to travel back.

The Hoo Peninsula is today an edgeland and a place of environmental dichotomies. A vast area, where giant operating container ports rumble on the same horizon as silent half buried war relics of the past. Where fields of managed land abuts wild margins of natural unmanaged land. It's a world navigated via long winding and sometimes contradictory footpaths. Paths that one minute are rubbish strewn smelly boot thieving bogs exposed to the aural effluent of distant industry, and the next, grassy and dry under foot, tranquil, shielded from all human noise. Wandering ways, lined with verdant vegetation. Filled with exotic sounding birds.

For some reason the body seems to adapt to this dichotomous terrain before the mind does. Though the contrasts are not as stark as they may seem when written down. In fact it's these edgeland contradictions that really make the Hoo Peninsula, particularly the area between the old fort and Higham Marshes, so sensorially fascinating. Of course eventually the mind does catch up with the body. And the feelings are good. Of sensory bathing. Bathing in meadow scents. In exotic bird calls. In happily humming insects foraging from plant to plant. In the timeless sound of baaing sheep and grazing cattle tearing up fresh meadow grass beside lapwings, cetti's warblers, skylarks, geese, ducks and red shank. The sheer density and diversity of creatures audible from this little tree hidden on the marsh, is really something to behold. And the way they exist between the human made anthropogenic noise, is something to behold too.