The Dismals, Terling, 2018

The first in a series of new recordings for the project. I was on my way to record proposed locations for garden villages, with the view that if they were built someone could make new recordings in the future and compare them to these. The traffic was awful around Chelmsford and Braintree so I decided to take to the back roads and found myself in Terling, a small village that I had never been to before. Approaching from the east I came across a small green with a bench and decided to sit here for a while and make a recording of the birds and rustling trees. It was great to be able to sit and listen for a while as the stress and workload of the recent few months began to drift away. Terling turned out to be a great place to unwind, with not much activity apart from a few cars passing by and plenty of bird activity including a blackbird that flew virtually straight over the microphone. A man on a ladder in the distance also provided some entertainment by tinkering with the overhead cables.

My experience wasn’t exactly described by the name of the nearest road: The Dismals. Some research needs to be done on how this place got its name as it certainly wouldn’t be the name I would have chosen given my time there on this lovely warm spring day.