Making an audio tour with Blind Life in Durham

Blog post by Naomi Foster, Geology Projects Officer

Since I started working for the North Pennines AONB Partnership in 2018, one of the highlights for me has been working with some groups of visually-impaired people to give them an opportunity to explore the North Pennines and particularly its geology. It’s a pretty tactile subject after all. We were just about to start running some events for 2020 when lockdown hit. Sight loss is often linked to other health conditions or ageing, so a lot of group members are potentially quite vulnerable, and it was clear that it would be a long time before they could get out together as a group again.

So what to do? Perhaps an armchair audio tour, with narration recorded out and about in the North Pennines to give a sense of the outdoors? I put the idea to our friends at Blind Life in Durham. Blind Life regularly send audio newsletters to some of their members and have volunteers who are experienced in recording audio descriptions, so this was the perfect partnership. They liked the idea but pointed out that my plan would produce lots of background noise and suggested using a few selected sounds to kick off the tour with a quiz.

I wrote a script for an audio tour of Upper Teesdale – probably the most visited part of the North Pennines. I’ve written a little bit of voiceover before, but only to go with visuals, and for performers whose voices I knew very well, so writing for this particular audience and narrators I’ve never met was a new challenge. I had a lot of fun trying to recreate a sense of Upper Teesdale and some of its key features using words alone. Folk at Blind Life checked the script so far, and I was pleased to find that they thought it would suit their members well. I had a go at recording a bit to test it out myself, including hiding under a blanket on the living room floor to dampen the echo!

Then came the sound clips. I could get bird sounds available to use under a Creative Commons licence easily enough, recorded by people with far greater skill than myself in such things (plus I’d missed the wader nesting season and was keen to have the sounds of lapwings and curlews that are so iconic in the North Pennines). However, if I wanted the sound of the water at Cauldron Snout, I was going to have to record it myself. After a brief walk around my neighbourhood trying to work out whether the best microphone would be my digital camera, or one of two different mobile phones, I decided I’d have to try them all on location and see what I got. And so I headed over to Teesdale.

The tour begins (spoiler alert!) with the wind at Cow Green Reservoir, and my, was it windy! I’d written something in the script about disappearing into the cloud, and the wind racing across the water, and it certainly didn’t disappoint. As I walked along the side of the reservoir and scrambled down the Pennine Way at Cauldron Snout, trying to keep the camera and phones dry, I didn’t see another soul. Probably because everyone else was too sensible to be up there in the delightful August weather. There was something special about having that whole expanse – the sound, feel and sight of it – all to myself though, after months of lockdown. Anyway, apart from it being too windy across the microphones to hear the wind (I kid you not), I got what I needed and headed further down the valley, regretting not packing dry underwear.

My walks to the pencil mill, High Force and Low Force were much more hospitable and there were lots of other people out and about too.

After some sorting and editing and re-writing, I sent it all off to Blind Life, and in no time there was a recording all set and ready to send out to their members. It went down very well with the group too – one member commented:

“I would like to congratulate Blind Life and the North Pennines group for the excellent production of the audio CD. It was a joy to listen to. Many thanks and well done to all our Blind Life readers, Jo, Helen, Dorri and Andrew, who as usual have done a great job. Well done indeed to all concerned.”

Not bad for a first attempt. And here is the finished article for you to enjoy too.

Click here to listen on SoundCloud

Find out more about Blind Life in Durham by visiting their website: http://www.blindlifeindurham.org.uk/

This project is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.