You can hear more sound from the Westmorland Association Football League here.
The Sound Diaries advent calendar returns this December with twenty four sounds of 24″ duration from our growing archive of audio documentation of grassroots football.
Expect white-line marking; lawn mowing; apoplectic coaches; gale force winds; reversing trucks; despairing goalkeepers; disinterested spectators; rattling dugouts; lacklustre rounds of applause; and football not happening!
You can hear more sounds from the Westmorland Association Football League here.
The Sound Diaries advent calendar returns this December with twenty four sounds of 24″ duration from our growing archive of audio documentation of grassroots football.
Expect white-line marking; lawn mowing; apoplectic coaches; gale force winds; reversing trucks; despairing goalkeepers; disinterested spectators; rattling dugouts; lacklustre rounds of applause; and football not happenning!
In April I travelled to Grasmere with poet and football coach Steven Matthews to investigate the soundscape of locations that relate to the poetry and life of William Wordsworth. After spending an afternoon at Greenhead Gill recording the sounds of fast flowing water – the tumultuous brook of Wordsworth’s Michael, a pastoral poem (1800) – we headed to Hillard Park the home of Ambleside United to see their reserves host AFC Carlisle in the Westmorland Association Football League Division Three. As soon as we parked up on Under Loughrigg – the lane that runs along the course of the River Rothay as it heads South towards Windermere – we could hear the sounds of the game. We crossed the river and I stopped to listen to the shouts and commands of the players and coaches as they blended with the babble of the flowing water, the distant vibrations of air-traffic, occasional cars on the lane and birdsong. The sounds of the match are only audible as play moves towards us at the Northern end of the ground. The sound of the ball being struck is distinctive and cuts across the sound of the river:
Steven walked on and headed up the bank at the Northern edge of the pitch and I stopped again to listen. Further away from the river now the soundscape is less consistent with the flowing water just a light white noise. The shouts of the players counterpoint the calls of birds in the low shrubs and children playing on the other side of the park. The thud of the ball can be heard in more detail now and with less uniformity. The dull bird-scaring slap of the goalkeepers kick is joined by lighter sounds – headers and the occasional deft touch perhaps:
We took up a position behind the goal and watched the last twenty minutes of the second half:
(Hillard Park)