Open Country

This is the story of a young man called William Henry Quinn who returned from war and walked from Cornwall to Scotland. He also went to Wales, the Cotswolds and the Yorkshire Dales. It's a tale for anyone who has ever tried to regather themselves with a little help from time and landscape, but the truth of his journey is not quite all it seems. There are letters, photos and various objects including a marlin knife, all of them belonging to Lottie Davies. Miles Warde met Lottie Davies out on Dartmoor to find out who Quinn really was, and whether he walked until the land ran out.With contributions from actor Sam Weir and narrated by Kate Chaney.The producer for BBC Audio in Bristol is Miles Warde

Did you buy a kayak or perhaps a paddle board after lockdown? And do you know where you can go now? According to Nick Hayes - who lives on a houseboat on the River Thames - you can only legally access around three to four percent of England's waterways. Scotland has the right to roam. Nick is the author of The Book of Trespass and uses his canoe to go shopping and take out his rubbish too. This is fine on his section of the Thames, but he has been confronted on other rivers .... so who owns our waterways, and what exactly are the rules?With further contribution from Ben Seal of British Canoeing, and produced in Bristol by Miles Warde.

Blackbirds, wrens, reed warblers, yellowhammers, sparrows and crows - this is a programme about British birds and the places where they live. One day botanical painter Susan Ogilvy found a strange object on her lawn. It was damp and green, and had been blown out of a tree by a storm. Once it had dried it fluffed up into a beautiful chaffinch nest. Susan was entranced and began to paint it. "Birds follow their own architecture but they use the materials they find around them - twigs and grasses and leaves, and they use them in the spring when they are young and bendy. When we see them in the autumn they've dried up, so everything has become much more brittle."Over the last five years she's painted another seventy abandoned nests, and she's been increasingly helped by neighbours who find them, plus a local expert, Deon Warner. This programme is as much about Deon as it is about Susan herself. Together they stride out across the local Somerset landscape to see what they can find.Produced by Miles Warde with readings by Emily Knight.

The North Channel is the stretch of water which lies between Scotland and Northern Ireland. At its narrowest, it's just 13 miles wide. In this programme, Helen Mark explores the stories surrounding the journeys which are made from one side to the other. She meets one of the crew working on the passenger ferries which plough back and forth and learns what life is like for those whose working lives centre around this journey. She hears about the sad story of the Princess Victoria - a ferry which sank making the crossing in 1953, with the loss of more than 130 lives.There have been suggestions for a fixed crossing, either a bridge or a tunnel, for more than a century - an idea recently revived by Boris Johnson. Helen asks an architect whether it could ever really happen. She also meets a woman preparing to try and make the crossing under her own steam, by swimming between the two coasts - braving the cold, the currents and the jellyfish.Helen reflects on her own personal relationship with the North Channel - having been born on one side, but lived most of her life on the other - and asks whether this narrow strip of sea serves to connect or divide the people on either side.Produced by Emma Campbell.

Fashion designer and judge of The Great British Sewing Bee, Patrick Grant, has a dream: he wants to create a line of jeans made in Blackburn. It sounds simple, but Patrick wants to go the whole hog - growing the crop to make the fabric in Blackburn, growing the woad to dye it blue in Blackburn and finally processing the flax into linen and sewing it all together...in Blackburn.In this programme, the writer and broadcaster Ian Marchant travels to a tiny field of flax on the side of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, where Patrick and a group of passionate local people are trying to make this dream a reality, and bring the textile industry back to Blackburn.But why? Blackburn and the area around it has been shaped by the textile industry for centuries, with the carcasses of old cotton mills littering the landscape. Ian visits Imperial Mill to hear what life was like for workers there in the industry's heyday. He finds out how Patrick and the team have been inspired by the visit of Mahatma Gandhi to Lancashire 90 years ago and learns why cotton made for a complicated relationship between Imperial Britain and India.Presented by Ian Marchant Produced by Heather Simons

Archaeologist and artist Rose Ferraby explores the connections between people and stone on the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset, where as a child she used to watch adders basking in the old quarries and hunt for crickets on the limestone cliffs. There’s a waymaker on the coastal path; a swirling ammonite fossil emerges alongside deep cut letters and chisel marks. “For me this sums up what stone is“ says Rose, “a meeting place of people and earth.” Over the years, Rose has become increasingly interested in the links and stories which connect people and stone, and in this programme she returns to Dorset to meet a geologist, a fossil collector and a father and son whose quarry has been in the family since the 17th century. She also follows a trail of dinosaur footprints and braves an underground tunnel as she explores the relationships between people and stone. Produced by Sarah Blunt for BBC Audio in Bristol.

A conversation between the Tipalt Burn and Hadrian’s Wall, a legend about treasure that is buried under Thirlwall castle, the conflict between urban and rural life, the significance of the wall, hidden and lost sounds and the migration and transformation of stone are all themes which feature in an immersive sound walk through a Northumberland landscape. Open Country meets several of the artists, poets, musicians, singers, storytellers, composers and writers who were involved in creating this four-mile walk near the village of Greenhead. We discover how they were inspired by the landscape and community of this area and find out how their work was realised.The story begins in December 2020 when Green Croft Arts commissioned 14 artists with strong links to Northumberland and Cumbria to explore the theme of ‘Collision and Conflict’ for a geolocator sound walk which was launched in the spring of 2021. Participants are invited to downloaded an app onto their phones, and then follow a route marked on a map through the landscape. The artistic responses – a mix of music, storytelling, spoken word and sounds - are linked to specific locations along the route. They are triggered as the walker approaches and can be heard through headphones. It’s an extraordinary immersive journey exploring the past and present, local and global, landscape, hidden sounds, community and culture. Producer Sarah Blunt FOR MORE INFORMATION Green Croft Arts https://www.greencroftonthewall.com/

Travel writer Ash Bhardwaj revisits his childhood haunts at Windsor Great Park. The 16,000 acre park is only around twenty-five miles from central London, but has an impressive range of different landscapes and wildlife habitats - from traditional formal flowerbeds to ancient woodland, a deer park, farmland and even a site of special scientific interest. Ash meets the deputy ranger to learn about the history of the park, and finds out about the role played in its post-war evolution by the most recent head ranger, the late Duke of Edinburgh. A conservation specialist from Natural England shows Ash how to tell the age of an oak tree by measuring its girth, and explains the intricate ecology of the rare species of fungi and insects which thrive in the wildlife habitats provided by the trees - some of which have been growing in the park since the time of the Norman Conquest. Ash also meets up with a florist whose choice of career was inspired and influenced by having spent so much of her own childhood playing among the park's shrubs and flowers, and he visits the stables that are home to the horses which pull carriages up and down the famous Long Walk, with its views of Windsor Castle. The visit leads Ash to reflect on how much difference having access to Windsor Great Park made to him, growing up as he did in a garden-less flat above a restaurant. He concludes that the park was largely responsible for sparking his lifelong interest in the countryside and the natural world. Produced by Emma Campbell

Ian Marchant tracks the River Ancholme to its source. Others might prefer the Limpopo or the Zambesi, but Ian is drawn to the subtle mysteries of the canal-like Ancholme in Lincolnshire, arguing that there are delights to be found if you take a close look in your own back yard. And there are plenty of delights. If historic boats are your thing then there's Humber Sloop Amy Howson, an ochre-sailed ship moored at the mouth of the Ancholme, in the care of the Humber Keels and Sloop Preservation Society, or Brigg Raft, a five metre Bronze age raft designed specifically for the slow moving waters of the Ancholme. Brigg was always, it seems, a good place to keep a boat. The town is an island, created by two channels of the Ancholme encircling its centre. Brigg Raft and the even more astounding Brigg Log Boat (nearly fifteen metres long) were discovered in 1886, lurking in mud at the site of what is now Glanford Boat Club. There are still around fifty boats moored at Glanford Boat Club, a vibrant social centre.Just off the course of the Ancholme is Stow Minster, which has, etched into its stone, two images of Viking longships: further evidence of visitors by boat to central Lincolnshire. But will Ian make it to the source in the Lincolnshire Wolds? And how would he know if he got there?Produced for BBC Audio by Mary Ward-Lowery

With its beaches, rugged cliffs and imposing headlands, the Durham coastline is a dramatic landscape, stretching from Sunderland to Hartlepool in North East England. Today it's designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty owing to its Magnesian Limestone grasslands, wildflower meadows and ancient woodlands. But this coastline was once the site of several of Durham’s last deep coal mines and notorious for its ‘black beaches’ and heavily polluted landscape. In the late 1900s, after the closure of the pits, it was transformed in a multi-agency clean-up to remove well over a million tonnes of colliery spoil which had been tipped onto the coast. Today it's “a wonderful conglomeration of human and geological layers” says archaeologist and artist Rose Ferraby. Rose along with poets Katrina Porteus and Phoebe Power revisit this landscape which inspired a book of illustrated poems and prose as part of the National Trust’s People’s Landscape project which explores the role landscapes have played in social change. We hear from a former miner and a litter picker, discover beauty in an abandoned mattress, watch a butterfly through the lens of a child’s camera, uncover a kaleidoscope of colours, catch up on memories of life working underground and wind-blow corn cockles above ground. Producer Sarah Blunt.Further Information: People’s Landscapes https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/peoples-landscapes-explore-the-places-that-have-shaped-the-nation Durham Heritage Coast https://durhamheritagecoast.org/ Beach Cleans https://durhamheritagecoast.org/our-coast/caring-for-our-coast/beach-cleans/ Sea Change https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/katrina-porteous-and-phoebe-power-sea-change Katrina Porteus, Two Countries (2014)