204 Rain falls on steep craggy woodland (sleep safe)

Radio Lento podcast

Fresh rain. Fresh woodland rain, from Miller's Dale in Derbyshire. From a hedgehog's perspective. Low on the forest floor, amidst the leaf litter, and the tangled ivy. A hidden hedgehog's place where only raindrops that have missed every leaf, twig and branch above, lands.

In total darkness the night before, we'd tied the Lento box to the broad base of a tree to capture the sound-scene of this place. On the very edge of a precipitous ravine. Far below, beyond a procession of trees whose vertical trunks grew up from ground too steep to climb, rilled the River Wye. It shined through the night as a vail of clean, wide white noise, and rose up as an aural mist, from the shallow fast rushing water below.

As the new day began to dawn, the Lento box listened alone. Faithfully capturing the aural experience of the falling rain, a hedgehog roused its prickly self around the foot of the tree. Time passes. Fresh banks of rain come, and go. Distant birds call from the high tree tops. Wood pigeons coo, from their sheltered perches. It's a world of tall leafy trees, and falling water. And flowing water. And steep sided valleys. And plunging green meadows. And craggy, exposed rock formations.

* Nearby this wooded location, with lofty views over Miller's Dale, is Ravenstor YHA. A gloriously echoey retreat, whose grand columned entrance also shows the building's austere past. Now it welcomes the gladly fatigued, bearing rucksacks on worn shoulders, with an appetite for a bunk bed slumber, preceded by a hearty self-cooked meal prepared in a friendly communal kitchen. This is where we stayed overnight while both Lento boxes recorded. Hear what the other box captured on episode 184.