0:00:10 > 0:00:12'It's a chilly old day out there today.
0:00:12 > 0:00:14'We've got quite a strong, fresh, northerly,
0:00:14 > 0:00:18'north-easterly wind blowing through some fairly heavy showers.
0:00:18 > 0:00:21'Now, the showers, hopefully, will start to diminish.
0:00:21 > 0:00:25'They will gradually start to become fewer and further between.
0:00:25 > 0:00:27'Maybe one or two more heading through The Wash and down inland
0:00:27 > 0:00:29'that way later on today,
0:00:29 > 0:00:31'but we'll get some sunny spells between these showers,
0:00:31 > 0:00:33'and the showers aren't lasting long.
0:00:33 > 0:00:35'They're blowing through on that breeze quite quickly.
0:00:35 > 0:00:38'The coastal waters forecast valid until midday,
0:00:38 > 0:00:40'for The Wash. Wind force seven to eight,
0:00:40 > 0:00:43'becoming force five to seven. Wind direction north-easterly,
0:00:43 > 0:00:45'maximum gusts 62 knots, becoming 43 knots.
0:00:45 > 0:00:49'Sea state, rough. Pressure 1,009 millibars and visibility excellent.'
0:03:12 > 0:03:15BIRDSONG
0:03:17 > 0:03:19It's a big flock of golden plovers.
0:03:26 > 0:03:28Such a sad song.
0:03:33 > 0:03:37These birds are really good at flying, but they're all tested here.
0:03:37 > 0:03:40- They're all...? - Tested, really tested.
0:03:40 > 0:03:43Even the ones that have come from a long, long way away, even they...
0:03:43 > 0:03:46It's really hard to stay in the air.
0:03:47 > 0:03:48- Because of the wind?- Yeah.
0:03:52 > 0:03:56- There's hardly any wind. - No, but it's still blasting.
0:04:01 > 0:04:05Is that the mound over there that they're heading to?
0:04:05 > 0:04:06It could be, yeah.
0:04:08 > 0:04:14It's this weird barrow or tumulus right on the edge of the salt marsh.
0:04:15 > 0:04:21'It's the highest place around and it's the place I imagine capturing
0:04:21 > 0:04:23'that kind of pure Wash wind.'
0:05:31 > 0:05:34'I've been bird-watching ever since I was six or seven.
0:05:34 > 0:05:38'Starting in the back garden and widening my horizons as much as
0:05:38 > 0:05:43'I possibly could. Going out first in kind of crappy places,
0:05:43 > 0:05:45'reservoirs and sewage farms,
0:05:45 > 0:05:52'but I've never been to as wild a place as this before I came here.'
0:05:55 > 0:05:57Do you see anything out there?
0:05:57 > 0:05:59Yes. It's absolutely wonderful, actually.
0:05:59 > 0:06:04These knot are just making the most beautiful helixes and spurts.
0:06:04 > 0:06:07Like fantastic clouds of dust.
0:06:08 > 0:06:09Lit dust.
0:06:11 > 0:06:13They're so close to the sea,
0:06:13 > 0:06:20they look like they're, sort of, sea spray just launched into the air.
0:06:22 > 0:06:26There must be 10,000 there.
0:06:26 > 0:06:29Seething and pulsing in the storm of life.
0:06:34 > 0:06:37Is this what you would have seen when you first came here?
0:06:37 > 0:06:41I think actually this bank even wasn't here when I first came here.
0:06:41 > 0:06:46I think I was on a further inland bank, so I'm now walking where,
0:06:46 > 0:06:49when I came as a teenager,
0:06:49 > 0:06:52there would have been marsh or even open mud.
0:06:56 > 0:06:59I was about 13 or 14
0:06:59 > 0:07:01and my dad had taken me here.
0:07:01 > 0:07:06I had time off school. I was recovering from glandular fever
0:07:06 > 0:07:11and this was my recuperation treat, was to come here.
0:07:11 > 0:07:13So that was a sweet thing to do.
0:07:13 > 0:07:15To give me time, yeah.
0:07:15 > 0:07:20And I knew it was good, and I knew it was hard to get to. It was...
0:07:20 > 0:07:23There's a fantastic flock of geese just going past now.
0:07:23 > 0:07:26The opposite to those not
0:07:26 > 0:07:29all dark and inky, like writing on the sky.
0:07:32 > 0:07:35Serious by comparison, when there's not.
0:07:37 > 0:07:41But it was a place, a great place to meet the sea, The Wash,
0:07:41 > 0:07:44because it seemed to be a place where the sea was permanently
0:07:44 > 0:07:48meeting the land and both were unresolved about
0:07:48 > 0:07:50the status of each.
0:07:51 > 0:07:56And I like that, even then. I liked that questionable shore.
0:08:00 > 0:08:02It's a scary place here, in its own way. It's so...
0:08:04 > 0:08:09..apparently empty and, yet, so extraordinarily powerful,
0:08:09 > 0:08:10the sky.
0:08:10 > 0:08:13But also the very flatness of the place.
0:08:15 > 0:08:17And of course, this is a very man-made landscape.
0:08:17 > 0:08:19This edge is a brokered edge,
0:08:19 > 0:08:23an edge made by banks and reclamation of land.
0:08:25 > 0:08:27AEROPLANE DRONE
0:08:32 > 0:08:37Plus the United States Air Force and maybe the RAF constantly overhead.
0:08:39 > 0:08:44The sea and the marsh here being a kind of non-place and, therefore,
0:08:44 > 0:08:48the appropriate place for the dropping of bombs -
0:08:48 > 0:08:50dummy bombs, practice bombs,
0:08:50 > 0:08:56by planes and by pilots who maybe tomorrow will be in the Middle East,
0:08:56 > 0:08:58dropping bombs.
0:09:49 > 0:09:50'When I was young, it was birds,
0:09:50 > 0:09:54'and so walking was just the means to meet the birds.
0:09:54 > 0:09:57'But as I've got older,
0:09:57 > 0:09:59'the birds, in some ways, have become more incidental.
0:10:15 > 0:10:19There are all the famous quotations, you know, Kierkegaard and others.
0:10:19 > 0:10:24"Do not lose your desire to walk. Above all, do not lose your desire
0:10:24 > 0:10:26"to walk, I walk myself well, every day,
0:10:26 > 0:10:28"into good health."
0:10:29 > 0:10:30I believe all that.
0:10:41 > 0:10:44Interestingly, the speed with which you're through a landscape,
0:10:44 > 0:10:48not only changes what you see, but how you experience it.
0:10:52 > 0:10:55There's a wonderful story about Matisse
0:10:55 > 0:10:58going for a drive in a car,
0:10:58 > 0:11:01and being horrified at how fast the car was moving,
0:11:01 > 0:11:06and insisting in future that no car journey that he was part of should
0:11:06 > 0:11:10travel at more than 5mph, because he couldn't see the trees properly.
0:11:22 > 0:11:24I actually find that moving,
0:11:24 > 0:11:27walking, particularly, the length of the stride
0:11:27 > 0:11:31becomes part of the length of a line.
0:11:31 > 0:11:33I know lots of poets
0:11:33 > 0:11:36would say the same thing and I think it was said that
0:11:36 > 0:11:41you can tell the difference between
0:11:41 > 0:11:47Coleridge and Wordsworth. The way they walked is written straight
0:11:47 > 0:11:48into the way they wrote their poems.
0:11:48 > 0:11:51Coleridge used to run around the place,
0:11:51 > 0:11:55up and down mountains and was always breaking off his walk to look
0:11:55 > 0:11:59at things. And his line lengths replicate that,
0:11:59 > 0:12:05whereas Wordsworth used to prefer to compose when walking on a level,
0:12:05 > 0:12:09gravelled pathway, so his writing has an evenness.
0:12:11 > 0:12:13But anyway, but writing,
0:12:13 > 0:12:17and putting the world into words is definitely easier
0:12:17 > 0:12:22and comes to you through the rhythm of a stride,
0:12:22 > 0:12:26and that comes, again, best of all when you're on your own.
0:12:30 > 0:12:32'Dusk on the winter solstice,
0:12:32 > 0:12:34'the shortest day and longest night of the year.
0:12:35 > 0:12:39'I was cold and alone on a track on the Somerset Levels.
0:12:39 > 0:12:41'Looking towards the dying light in the west.
0:12:43 > 0:12:47'Moving across the sky in front of me, like the breath of the earth,
0:12:47 > 0:12:48'were thousands of birds.
0:12:49 > 0:12:52'Starlings, arriving to roost.
0:12:52 > 0:12:55'To put away their day, and so, too, on this day, the year.
0:12:57 > 0:13:00'From the next dawn, the glorious creep towards Spring
0:13:00 > 0:13:01'would be underway,
0:13:01 > 0:13:08'more light, a future, repairs, song, nests and eggs.'
0:13:21 > 0:13:26It is a sort of oblivion that I'm seeking, by being on my own
0:13:26 > 0:13:27out in a place like this.
0:13:31 > 0:13:34A kind of dissolve
0:13:34 > 0:13:35into a landscape.
0:13:39 > 0:13:40I think that's, ultimately, for me
0:13:40 > 0:13:45what looking at birds does and what being in open space does.
0:13:46 > 0:13:49'It takes the bigness of self and dissolves it.'
0:14:07 > 0:14:11As a radio producer I spend a lot of my time recording people in places
0:14:11 > 0:14:16like this, for radio programmes, and the wind is an enemy at that point.
0:14:16 > 0:14:19It's what radio producers call wild track.
0:14:19 > 0:14:23It's the thing that you want a bit of, in order to prove to people that
0:14:23 > 0:14:26you've been out here like it is now, gusting.
0:14:26 > 0:14:27But you don't want so much.
0:14:35 > 0:14:39I've always, as a bird person as well, wanted to pay more attention
0:14:39 > 0:14:42to the wild track. Wild track is the thing.
0:14:42 > 0:14:48Ultimately, for me, it's not the people, he said, misanthropically!
0:14:50 > 0:14:54The problem, of course, is that it's really, really hard to record,
0:14:54 > 0:14:58because in some ways it doesn't exist as a sound.
0:14:58 > 0:15:03What we hear as, and what we think of as the wind, is the sound that
0:15:03 > 0:15:07the wind is making, as it rubs over the surface of the world,
0:15:07 > 0:15:11whether that's these marsh grasses here,
0:15:11 > 0:15:15or the sea further out or the trees behind us.
0:15:18 > 0:15:21So I've got some fantasy about trying to record pure wind,
0:15:21 > 0:15:24wind as wind might sound in its own ear.
0:15:26 > 0:15:31And I kind of imagine myself listening in my retirement
0:15:31 > 0:15:32to my wind tapes,
0:15:32 > 0:15:35where all the people have stopped talking,
0:15:35 > 0:15:38all the people I've been recording for years and years have stopped,
0:15:38 > 0:15:42and now it's just the turn
0:15:42 > 0:15:45of the really big voices
0:15:45 > 0:15:46to have their say.
0:16:01 > 0:16:02What are you hearing?
0:16:02 > 0:16:04I can hear this incredible...
0:16:04 > 0:16:05GEESE CACKLE
0:16:07 > 0:16:11..rubbery brent goose noise.
0:16:11 > 0:16:13A flock of brent geese just flew
0:16:13 > 0:16:16down into the salt marshes in front of us,
0:16:16 > 0:16:22about 300 or so, and they're talking to one another.
0:16:23 > 0:16:24Rubbery conversation.
0:16:24 > 0:16:28And as well as that I can hear the wind, of course,
0:16:28 > 0:16:33and the wind is suitably supporting, it is always the supporting note,
0:16:33 > 0:16:34is the note that runs...
0:16:36 > 0:16:37..beneath everything.
0:16:58 > 0:17:00I love looking up the sky.
0:17:02 > 0:17:05It's a, sort of, transport to childhood, somehow.
0:17:07 > 0:17:09I don't quite know why.
0:17:11 > 0:17:14This is what the surface of the Earth sees.
0:17:17 > 0:17:20The wind is visible, the way the clouds are moving.
0:17:25 > 0:17:31The first time the wind really most obviously came to call on me
0:17:31 > 0:17:34was when, as a young teenager, I used to have a newspaper round.
0:17:34 > 0:17:39I lived in Bristol and my newspaper round took me across
0:17:39 > 0:17:40the Clifton Suspension Bridge,
0:17:40 > 0:17:44which is a fantastic spanning of the Avon Gorge.
0:17:45 > 0:17:51A natural wind tunnel and funnel, and creator of its own wind.
0:17:55 > 0:17:58And one day, I was taking my bag of newspapers
0:17:58 > 0:18:02across the bridge, to deliver them on the other side -
0:18:02 > 0:18:04the afternoon Bristol evening paper -
0:18:04 > 0:18:07and there was one other person on the bridge ahead of me.
0:18:08 > 0:18:11And as I gathered towards him,
0:18:11 > 0:18:15in a windy day, not unlike today, actually,
0:18:15 > 0:18:18November-ish and cold and already getting dark
0:18:18 > 0:18:20at three o'clock in the afternoon,
0:18:20 > 0:18:24this man, he was a man,
0:18:24 > 0:18:28looked behind him once, caught my eye briefly,
0:18:28 > 0:18:32and then, in an amazingly elegant and, kind of, continuous piece
0:18:32 > 0:18:36of movement, vaulted over the side of the bridge.
0:18:37 > 0:18:39Into the wind, as it seemed.
0:18:39 > 0:18:43Into the air, which, of course, didn't hold him up.
0:18:43 > 0:18:46Momentarily, he seemed to, sort of, stall in the air,
0:18:46 > 0:18:51like I knew birds would when they were mastering the wind,
0:18:51 > 0:18:55but because he wasn't a bird, he didn't stop,
0:18:55 > 0:18:58and down he went. And I didn't follow him down.
0:18:58 > 0:19:01I dropped my bicycle which I was riding,
0:19:01 > 0:19:05I dropped my bag of newspapers and ran back to the tollbooth
0:19:05 > 0:19:06on the side of the bridge.
0:19:09 > 0:19:14I ran back, I think, because I thought, if I got back quick enough,
0:19:14 > 0:19:17someone might be able to catch him somehow at the bottom,
0:19:17 > 0:19:19which obviously didn't happen.
0:19:20 > 0:19:23But that was a wind story to me,
0:19:23 > 0:19:28because it proved to me, in some ways, that the air,
0:19:28 > 0:19:35as pushed through that gorge, was a place simply that
0:19:35 > 0:19:41we couldn't go, that wasn't ours for entering or mastering in any way.
0:19:43 > 0:19:48And yet the birds were rising and falling in that wind.
0:19:48 > 0:19:49It's their place, not ours.
0:20:07 > 0:20:10So now, here I am,
0:20:10 > 0:20:15in this extraordinary open stage,
0:20:15 > 0:20:18this cockpit of weather
0:20:18 > 0:20:22at the bottom of The Wash,
0:20:22 > 0:20:25with about five or six weather systems,
0:20:25 > 0:20:29different winds, different clouds, beetling overhead.
0:20:33 > 0:20:35With my...
0:20:36 > 0:20:39..equivalent of a pilgrim's staff or dowser's rod.
0:20:42 > 0:20:44Come to capture some wind, if I can.
0:21:04 > 0:21:06It looks pretty scary up ahead.
0:21:09 > 0:21:10Fantastic storm light now.
0:21:16 > 0:21:19But the mound is here, floodlit.
0:21:23 > 0:21:25It's like a long barrow,
0:21:25 > 0:21:29you expect some ancient king to be interred in there.
0:21:31 > 0:21:35Actually, I think it's a failed modern attempt at creating
0:21:35 > 0:21:37a freshwater reservoir.
0:21:47 > 0:21:50If we can just get to there,
0:21:50 > 0:21:52then we can...secure our wind.
0:22:04 > 0:22:08It suddenly feels all severe.
0:22:09 > 0:22:13You feel like you're under the level of everything around you,
0:22:13 > 0:22:16off the bank, on the mud.
0:22:17 > 0:22:21Footprints and goose feet and wildfowl feet.
0:22:28 > 0:22:30Weird marsh grass.
0:23:30 > 0:23:37Curlews and skylarks and tiny little meadow pipit noises.
0:23:37 > 0:23:41Always moving from the fresh to the salt.
0:23:41 > 0:23:42WIND SOUND INTENISFIES
0:25:37 > 0:25:39It's pure wind.
0:25:42 > 0:25:45I feel like I'm nearer to the wind
0:25:45 > 0:25:47than I've been before.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51Just right into it.
0:25:51 > 0:25:55You feel it coming straight at you,
0:25:55 > 0:25:57from who knows where, out to the north.
0:26:03 > 0:26:04Like it hasn't stopped for anything yet.
0:26:10 > 0:26:13I'm probably the first thing this wind has hit
0:26:13 > 0:26:15for about 1,000 miles.
0:26:18 > 0:26:20And it's telling me so.
0:26:23 > 0:26:25HE CHUCKLES
0:26:25 > 0:26:29I can hear it as wind, it's really good.
0:26:31 > 0:26:34I don't hear the sea and I don't hear the grass.
0:26:34 > 0:26:37There's not much grass, anyway, and the mud is quiet.
0:26:44 > 0:26:45It's, kind of, bird wind.
0:26:48 > 0:26:50When you're in it and it's blowing you around,
0:26:50 > 0:26:52but it's not actually sounding
0:26:52 > 0:26:57like anything other than itself, which is what you are, as well.
0:26:59 > 0:27:02I sometimes think, if the dead go anywhere, they go
0:27:02 > 0:27:04into the wind.
0:27:05 > 0:27:11That's where everything that was is kept in motion,
0:27:11 > 0:27:12blowing and going.
0:27:17 > 0:27:19All the birds and all the people.
0:27:31 > 0:27:35WIND RUMBLES
0:27:40 > 0:27:43WIND WHISTLES