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Remote solitude with skylarks, on Cut Hill, Dartmoor

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Philip_Goddard

December 29th, 2022

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Soundscapes > Nature
Yelverton, Devon, England, United Kingdom
Animals (including birds and insects)

A peaceful and eerily intense sense of remote solitude here (you can surely almost cut it with a knife!), on what is reputedly southern England's remotest spot, on the top of Cut Hill, Dartmoor, Devon, UK, with just a little breeze chasing around the peat hags. The sun goes in as the recording starts, so the skylark sounds progressively peter out…

I made this short recording on 20 April 2013, on the summit of Cut Hill, with the recorder sheltered from the breeze by a peat hag. I wanted it to be a longer recording, but the sun went in and all the skylarks progressively stopped singing, and it looked as though I'd have quite a wait for the sun to come out and encourage them all to get going again. So I walked on, and decided I'd come back there as soon as practicable on a very sunny day for an extended Cut Hill recording session. That came about, and you can hear the fruits of that session in my next upload here.

Advisory
This is a quiet, immensely peaceful soundscape, so the wise listener goes easy with the volume control!

The terrain of this recording session, on Cut Hill summit area
Photo taken on the next recording session on Cut Hill summit, so ignore the foreground recorder. This recording was made right beside the actual summit, which is on the skyline, about centre of this view, and was facing about the same direction as the foreground recorder here, but somewhat recessed in the peat hag system for shelter from the breeze.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield, and it was placed on a Hama mini tripod, which meant it was only a very few inches above the ground.

Initial post-recording processing was to apply an EQ curve to compensate for muffling from the furry windshield, and, much more recently, to apply 200% widening of stereo soundstage, using A1 Stereo Control, followed by an EQ tilt away from the treble (straight line from no change at 100Hz, to -7dB at 8kHz) to compensate for the treble boost resulting from the stereo widening.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thanks!

This recording can be used free of charge, provided that it's not part of a materially profit-making project, and it is properly and clearly attributed. The attribution must give my name (Philip Goddard) and link to https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/667310/

Sound illegal or offensive? Flag it!
ambiance
ambient
birds
birdsong
Cut-Hill
Dartmoor
Dartmoor-National-Park
Devon
England
field-recording
high-moorland
moorland
natural-soundscape
nature
open-moorland
peaceful
peat-hags
remote
remoteness
skylarks
solitude
spring
UK
wilderness
wind

Type

Flac (.flac)

Duration

6:06.115

File size

26.3 MB

Sample rate

44100.0 Hz

Bit depth

16 bit

Channels

Stereo

Comments
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O
oohoh1923213...

2 years, 8 months ago

its cool

  1. 91 downloads
  2. 1 comment
Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
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