Shush.

Hiss. Chirrup.

I’m standing knee-deep in a thick carpet of heather on top of a hill in the middle of nowhere —  and my brain is trying to escape through my ears.

Rrrrribbit.

If you’ve ever been to a rock concert where you hit the interval and suddenly there’s nothing squeezing your head in a vice of amplified sound, prompting you to clutch your ears to stop them exploding – that’s how I feel right now. The everyday, deeply-ingrained din of human background noise is deafeningly absent. In its place, I can hear things I usually only read about. The hiss of wind through grass. The throaty chirrup of birdlife. The noise of a fat, painfully dry looking frog clambering through the heather, heading for the boggy patch a few yards back where recent burning (by gamekeepers) has singed and frayed the quilt of plantlife.

Roar-thump. Roar-thump.

That’s my blood roaring, my heart thumping. No combustion engine noises, no tinny mp3s, no layered sounds of human activity receding into the distance, combining to make an exciting but wearying pandemonium. There’s just the land and the sky and their usual inhabitants, as quiet as a library —  plus one noisy interloper. (Shhhhh).

The irony of this viewpoint is that this moorland is probably man-made. Pollen analysis by environmental archaeologists has found signs of widespread forest-clearing in the area of the North York Moors, accelerating or perhaps even directly causing the development of moorland. Think environmental destruction is a modern thing? Not so. But “destroyed” is an unfairly loaded word to apply to this starkly beautiful, effortlessly quiet landscape.

Crackle.

Half a mile away the gamekeepers are burning another patch of heather. It’s a plant that grows too hardy for its own good, from soft, purple fronds to a tough woody consistency. If left to thrive, it smothers itself — so the gamekeepers strategically set it alight, taking the opportunity to bag any grouse that are startled out the undergrowth. It’s the hottest day of the English year so far, and the skyline is dotted with similar telltale plumes. Later, while approaching the entrance to a forest, a flurry of gunfire will make a grouse burst from under my feet with a noise like a thrown tomahawk in a bad Western.

How far do we need to go to find truly natural hush? In his book One Square Inch Of Silence, acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton road-trips across the North American continent to document and record the impact of humans upon their environment, with unsurprisingly worrying results. In a world waking up to the threat of wasted energy and ecological responsibility, sound pollution is still an issue almost nobody hears about. Meanwhile, the biophony is in uproar. Yay us.

I crunch, squelch and splinter my way down the path (overgrown in a matter of days since it was cleared — this moorland doesn’t know when to quit) and head back towards the road, towards the ceaseless racket of modern life. The birdsong disappears, the wind goes back to being felt rather than heard, and I pop my headphones in. The silence is silenced —  but it will keep echoing within me, until I reply with my feet and I’m back here again, standing in a field, captivated by absolutely nothing.

Mike Sowden is a noisily-typing freelance writer living in York, England. He contributes to local noise pollution by playing guitar and ukulele for fun (his fun, not anyone else’s). Even the name of his blog suggests unwanted noise. He is profoundly underqualified to write this blog post, but had nothing better to do because the local police have just confiscated his ukulele.

Image: North York Moors by nutmeg66. Creative Commons/Flickr.