I recently went to London to attend the wedding of the daughter of my friend who lives there. The wedding ceremony was wonderful. The bride and bridesmaids were beautiful, the groom resplendent, and the young guests full of life. The weather even did its bit and the sun shone.

However, I did not enjoy the reception afterwards. The food was excellent, the service could not be faulted, and décor of the venue was delightful. But the noise levels were terrible. I’m used to quietness. More than a hundred people all talking animatedly in a closed room with no acoustic buffering was torture for me. This was followed by loud music and dancing. There was no escape, I had to wait until my host decided to go home.

Fortunately, I’d decided to do something rather special the next day as I was ‘down south’ and go to a ‘singing with nightingales’ event in a Sussex wood. The events are run by the musician Sam Lee and he invites another musician to join him to duet with nightingales. The group walks through the wood to the hedges and scrub that the nightingales like to live in. The visitors settle down quietly, the musicians play, and the nightingale responds. It’s a bit chilly sitting still in the dark for an hour or so on an April night, but completely magical.

One of the helpers told me that the BBC had come with a cellist a few days previously to make a recording that will be broadcast to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the cellist Beatrice Harrison duetting with a nightingale in a Surrey garden. If you’re interested there a several clips of previous recordings on BBC radio ‘listen again’. I found them by searching for ‘Radio 3 nightingales’.

The woods were also looking beautiful with a haze of bluebells starred by white wood anemones in sun-dappled shade of a hornbeam coppice. The wood also has some wild service trees, so I searched for those and found one on the edge of a field, though its buds were only just breaking. Next month it will be in flower. Very nice to find such a rarity and a good indicator of ancient woodland.

The next day I had a long drive back up to Yorkshire. Endless motorway in a stream of traffic past row upon row of featureless warehouses that supply the ever-expanding home delivery businesses. The contrast with nightingales and bluebells was so striking and it felt rather strange that such different types of places are in the same country, perhaps even within a few miles of each other.

On my return home I went to the woods to gather wild ramsons for salad and pesto. It’s flowering now, but the bluebells here are a bit behind those in Sussex and are only just starting to come out. The woods are alive with bird song, too far north here for nightingales, but it’s the right sort of peaceful noise. Just the antidote I needed.

Have you heard a nightingale sing? They are mainly in the south-east of England but are common in other parts of Europe. Or if you are not within the range of nightingales have you been out to the woods to see bluebells or gather wild ramsons? Or any other activities in peaceful healing nature.

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member