There was a week in March 2003 when spring rushed in with a pretence of summer up here on the Scottish Borders. Daytime temperatures were high, touching 20˚C in some sheltered moments. Breeze was light. Sound transmission was softened but not crabbed. Animal life responded in its own seasonal ways. Myself included.
I headed out to a nearby loch (Scots for lake), lying in a basin on the edge of the hills, which I’d come to regard as a haven when I needed real quiet – a natural amphitheatre, with a fascinating spacious acoustic. My loch of tranquility.
One of the benefits of working freelance is you get to choose your own locations: and this allows you to get to know sites as listening places over time, and as you get to know its rhythms, to pick some special times to be there.
I’ve had a twenty-year love affair with this small loch in the Borders. I’ve seen it through a range of moods, but mostly I’ve chosen to visit in the expectation of calm. And it’s become a haven of tranquility for me where I’ve spent slow hours recording the scenes around a pair of remotely placed mics by the water’s edge.
The loch is set in a sheltered hollow of rolling moorland scattered with conifer plantations and pockets of native woodland on the edge of the vast planted forests of Eskdalemuir. About five miles to the east, a deep river valley cuts through this upland plateau and provides an arterial route through the Borders, from Carlisle to Edinburgh.
Although the location at 270m above sea level has many characteristics of the northern uplands, the loch itself has elements more akin to a lowland site. The western end where two burns flow into the loch is fairly shallow and is edged with a band of emergent vegetation of rushes and reeds. This is where the waterfowl like to hang out and feed. In ecological terms it appears fairly eutrophic.
Over the years I picked up good recordings of various calls of the water birds, helping to build up a picture of their vocabularies. Some of the finer calls of Coot here.
The acoustics of the arena. The quiet. It all made for a great sound stage.