It is a conundrum of our temperate latitudes that the season we associate with life’s fullest extent is the period when the “biophony” (nature’s collective music) is at its most restricted. There is greater insect sound (flies, bees, grasshoppers) but birdsong has fallen away and, in a sense, I find the silence disconcerting, because it expresses the end of all that upwelling life of the past 10 weeks. In its way, summer is more melancholy than any other time of year.
I also love the silence, however, as I sit here at last light. Summer’s residue of music is foregrounded by the stillness: young whitethroats chakking at our hedge: the curling line of autumn’s first robin and a late thrush, banging out a dozen half-hearted notes before succumbing to the wider mood.
Alas, the silence brings out in stark contrast the curse of the Peak District: motorbike noise. It is, of course, a minority who bypass MOT engine checks or illegally disable the silencer to maximise their violent output. But how does one assess the motives of one (and all I’ve seen so far are men) who, in the small hours of night, awakens an entire population, as he maps his route for miles through town and out over the moors, with poisonous decibels?
Noise is a pollution that elevates cortisol and adrenaline levels and can ultimately be fatal, for our species and every other. We are now alive to the toxic conditions of our waterways, but solving those decades of abuse will be complicated. Getting rid of noise pollution would surely be straightforward. In Paris they have radars that record noise as well as speed. Several hundred of them, spread at hotspots such as ours, would surely go a long way to eliminating the cause.
Silence returns as darkness falls. It lets you meditate on the tiniest details as well as the grandest themes. I’m pondering if that microscopic rustle of leaves beneath our viburnum is a frog or toad. And what kind of soundlessness, you wonder, attends the holy whoosh of the Earth as it journeys across the 125,000 miles in the time it took me to write these words?
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
