Remote solitude with skylarks and wind, on Cut Hill, Dartmoor

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 fairly stiff breeze chasing around the peat hags. The odd meadow pipit can be heard, and a distant carrion crow.

This is a concatenation of two pairs of concurrent recordings I made on 6 May 2013, on the summit of Cut Hill, with the recorders at least part-sheltered from the breeze by suitable peat hags. The wind often produces a dry rustling sound, which is mostly from the dead purple moor grass from last season. At this stage the green new growth is hardly showing yet, so the landscape here is still mostly a very anaemic straw colour rather than green, though beginning to change.

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

On the broad south spur of Amicombe Hill, on my way to Cut Hill (broad rise in centre on skyline) for this recording session (i.e., on 6 May 2013). Very challenging terrain for hiking, but at least one is serenaded by skylarks at this time of year.

View during this recording session (the first concurrent pair) -- R2 recorder, with some rushes close-by, which give a distinct 'rushing' quality to the wind sound, while R1 was sheltered by one of the skyline peat scarps in the centre of this view. Positions for the second consecutive pair of recordings were some 10 to 20 metres to left of this view, again sheltered from the stiff breeze by respective peat hags.

Techie stuff:
The recorders were Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield, and they were each placed on a Hama mini tripod, which meant they were only a very few inches above the ground, but at least could be relatively sheltered by suitable peat hags.

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.

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