Northlight Sound Walk

PLEASE READ THIS FIRST Welcome to Centre Vale Park bird song sound walk! For the best experience be sure to download the walk onto your phone at the start, rather than stream it as you go along. Have your battery fully or well charged too, as the walk uses GPS (Global Positioning System) and this will use up power. Listen to birds at various points around the park by walking into a blue CIRCLE. Each holds the song or call of a different species, and this sound will play (on a loop) whilst you are stood still within a circle. Clicking on a circle turns it yellow. A banner will come up and you can click this to see if there is a photograph of the bird. These images - all taken in the park - are being captured by local photographer Chris Foster, and added to the walk over time. To hear information on some of the distinguishing features of the different birds’ songs and calls, and how to remember them, walk into the blue SQUARE associated with each circle. The narrative will loop whilst you are stood still in the square. There is no defined route - just head for whichever circles and squares you want to. There are quite a lot of them, and the park is big, so you probably won't want to do everything in one go. Exploring different areas on different visits will work better! All the recordings come from the park, so depending on what time of year you do the walk you have a good chance of hearing these birds for real. The busiest and nosiest time of the year for birdsong is the Spring. Things quieten off considerably in late summer, but all year round there is nearly always the opportunity to hear some birdsong. Learning birdsong takes time – but going outside and immersing yourself in it is the best way, and little by little, species by species, you will begin to recognise who is there, even if you can’t see them! According to a 2018 biodiversity survey 50 different bird species use the park one way or another. Some live here all year round, some live here only for part of the year (as summer or winter migrants), and others live outside the park but come into it to feed. New recordings and pictures are be added to this walk over time but currently you can listen to the sounds of 18 birds (wren, robin, dunnock, chaffinch, blackbird, song thrush, great tit, blue tit, coal tit, long-tailed tit, chiff-chaff, nuthatch, greater spotted woodpecker, green woodpecker, carrion crow, jackdaws, rooks and wood pigeon). Recordings are by Jo Kennedy. Photographs of birds are by Chris Foster (https://www.chrisfosterphotography.com/) who got chatting to Jo one February morning in the park. Narration is by Jo Kennedy and Cathy Shaw. All copyright for sounds and images belongs to Jo Kennedy, Cathy Shaw and Chris Foster. The walk was produced by Nature Tripping Podcast. To listen to more stuff about nature in the Calder Valley and beyond check us out here https://www.jokennedysound.com/naturetripping, or on Apple podcasts and other podcast providers. Please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

An 18-minute geolocated sound guide for a (preferably snowy) field north of Hebden Bridge, UK. Includes sound recordings from the field itself and from Heptonstall graveyard, along with a swirling snowstorm of ambient drones and chopped and screwed 1980s pop loops (this is the A major version). The spoken word monologue connects Leon Trotsky, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Ian Curtis, comic Russ Abbot, and artist Paul Rooney’s 1990s band Rooney, who's singer Dermot Bucknall, and his disturbing 'performance' at a music gig in the Calder Valley, brings together many aspects of the piece in a darkly comic, ambiguous moment. The work is structured around a description of photographer Charlie Meecham taking a photograph of the snowy field in question for a TV documentary. The photograph was later chosen by Joy Division and Peter Saville to adorn the cover of the 12″ single Atmosphere. Thanks to Daniel Meadows, Charlie Meecham, Paul Rooney and Steve Fortune. More information here: http://owdscrat.com/alain-chamois/

IMPORTANT: Download the walk before starting or it will not work correctly. A song of lament for the thousands of long dead. A song that seems to emerge from the singing of birds in the trees, from the echoes sounding through cobbled streets and in empty churches, from the sounds of life in the village and from the tendrils of nature that encroach from the moor. Put on your headphones, hit start and playback will begin. You can see yourself as a blue dot on the map below, and the audio zones are represented in purple. When you are standing in an audio zone it will start playing back. Wander around Heptonstall and the music will change to fit your location. The piece uses 'Lyke Wake Dirge', an ancient funereal folk song, as its melodic basis. The music was created by Yonatan Collier. Vocals are by Hannah Ashcroft, fiddle was played by Luke Moller. The history of Heptonstall was used as inspiration for this composition. Heptonstall is a small place with a rich history; the village being mentioned as far back as the Domesday Book in 1087. It is the final resting place of the poet Sylvia Plath, who was buried in the New Graveyard in 1963 following her suicide. In the adjoining Old Churchyard lies ‘King’ David Hartley, leader of notorious local counterfeiting gang, the Cragg Vale Coiners. Hartley was hanged in York in 1770 for forgery and diminishing the coin; people leave coins on his grave to this day. Legend has it that the Coiners were responsible for the torture and murder of labourer Abraham Ingham in The Cross Inn pub, just a few meters from the Old Graveyard. Ingham was supposedly burned alive in the fireplace of the pub, then known as The Union Cross, for threatening to implicate the Coiners in the murder of a local official. The fireplace in question was uncovered during the renovation of the pub in 2016. Remarkably, the Old Churchyard alone is thought to contain more than one hundred thousand bodies. The numbers are so large as burials in the Upper Calder Valley could only take place in Halifax or Heptonstall until the 17th Century. The Old Churchyard is actually shared by two churches. St Thomas à Becket Church (more commonly known as Heptonstall Old Church), a striking ruin, dates back to the thirteenth century in places, while the newer Church of St Thomas the Apostle was completed in 1854. The village also has a Methodist chapel; the oldest in existence to have been continually in use since its inauguration. The Methodist leader, John Wesley, laid the foundation stone of the chapel, which was completed in 1764.

This is a circular wellbeing walk, that takes about an hour and a quarter. You may want to download and possibly print the map for the route from the website. Walking is a way of Being Active, one of the 5-ways to wellbeing. This walk also introduces you to the rest of the 5-ways through sound recordings that are triggered when you enter a particular zone.

PLEASE READ THIS FIRST Welcome to Marsden Jazz Festival’s village-based Chronotope soundwalk! For the best experience use headphones and be sure to tap the small green arrow to download the walk onto your phone before you start, rather than trying to stream it as you go along. Have your battery fully or well charged too, as the walk uses GPS (Global Positioning System) which will use up power. Listen to artists’ performances by walking into a blue zone, each of which contains a different track. The performances will play (on a loop) whilst you stay within a zone, and stop once you exit. Clicking on a zone turns it yellow. A banner will come up and you can click this to see some more information about each track. There is no defined route - just head for whichever zones you want to. As you wander around the village you may well also encounter ‘Easter eggs’— other hidden sounds recorded during the Chronotope sessions! About Chronotope: Music in a Different Time and Place In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced the first ever cancellation of Marsden Jazz Festival since its first edition in 1992. With funding from Arts Council England, the festival organisers commissioned five sets of artists to perform in different locations in the inspiring moorland landscape around Marsden and in St Bartholomew’s Church. The performances were filmed and recorded live on location and made available on the Marsden Jazz Festival YouTube channel. Now you can re-experience the Chronotope music and environmental sounds in locations around the centre of Marsden Village in an accessible village centre walk.

This is an audio story by Mark Jackson which accompanies an augmented reality PopupView campaign. Walk around the park, find the PopupView scenes, popup the animals and hear their tales. Find out more about this walk here: http://www.popupview.com/views-in-farnworth-park/

We embarked on a night walk circling Dove Mill which has been said to be haunted. The decrepit building fell into abandonment over 50 years ago. Although we aren't able to go inside or go beyond it's gates, we walked around the area of Deane Church Lane where it is located to see what we could hear!