CLOSE your eyes, lie back and think of Britain and its landscapes. On the screens of the eyelid come flashes of the grandeur of the C Cairngorms, the misted and mysterious Fens, the sheep-nibbled Downs, the Thames meandering languidly and roses around the door of a Cotswold cottage. Then, you realise there is a missing ingredient. Sound. Every image inside the eyelid is improved by adding a soundtrack; the peeow of a buzzard, the rustling of the reeds, the plop of a water vole entering the water-because every British vista should simultaneously be a soundscape.
We are too casual about matters aural. Our Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty are based on what is pleasing to the eye, rather than the ear. Everyone recognises a blot on the landscape, yet who complains about scratches on the soundscape? The sounds of the countryside need not even be natural such as the wind in the primordial willows-to soothe sore ears; the percussion of a willow bat on a cricket ball and the ensuing polite ripple of applause from the crowd on the village green is acknowledged ear-balm.
Since Anglo-Saxon times, at least, ours has been an agricultural landscape. Manufactured, if you like, albeit delightfully so, with fields tied up with ribbons of hedges and Lakeland hills relieved of their trees to expose their bodily contours. When we cut down the wild wood, we give the trilling skylark, a bird of the open aspect, its advantage. The point, of course, is that the sound of our countryside is composed by human intervention, even if some of the 'raw material' is provided by Mother Nature. Birdsong, geology, the weather, the trees and the beasts are all necessary components in the polyphony that is British Nature.
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