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May sound a strange question but I love finding places where I can't hear any evidence of human activity ie no engines/voices etc etc ..just the sound of nature. Has to be on land and not out at sea..
Without thinking too much I suspect for myself it would be somewhere on dartmoor as I live in exeter, but even then I suspect you'd hear the odd motor somewhere in the distance . Aircraft don't count as almost impossible to avoid.
I'm in Burnley.
It's debatable. 🙂
No certain to be honest, nowhere withing a long way where i could see stuff.. Probably a decent sized forest to suck up the sound. I used to be up the Ridgeway before the A34 got so busy and it used to be so quiet that noise of a train 5 or 6 imiles away really made the silence seem deeper.
Some parts of the South Downs, away from a car park, always seem peaceful to me, especially on a hot summers day when you stop for a snack and listen to the skylarks.
One lightswich and one set of headphones
Probably about 300-400 yards. i live in rural North Norfolk, 100m and i am on Nar Valley Way bridleway, 400yds and am surrounded by fields.
Last nights ride saw a badger, two male foxed absolutely tearing strips out of each other, hares, rabbits and a barn own, not had for 90 minutes.
Not a native and was working in London, living in Surrey before i moved here, so it was a bit of a culture shock, but after a few years here, i can understand why my wife (10 fingers, 10 toes, not webbed) missed it and wanted to move back
Dartmoor doesn't count. I believe it used to be woodland once upon a time, cleared in pre-history for grazing/farming. The nearest "untouched" places will be Iceland or northern Scandinavia.
not to far from the dales, the nym, the peak and the pennines. all have very quiet areas.
my commute to work can be along main roads, or the canal, or through local woods and parks. the canal option is the quietist. I choose that option for that reason.
A friend of mine, who used to be on this forum as PQ, went off bike packing every summer to various places in the world. He recounts that when traversing the Tibetan Plateau he went for over a week without seeing a single living thing.
Depends how pedantic you want to be. Most ‘rural’ places in the UK are managed by man ie Yorkshire Dales/Lakes etc
There's some woods 1km away from my house where you can't hear anything but natures. Very rarely do people venture on the footpaths next to it, but there are farmers fields surrounding it, so may get tractors now and again. Even then it's thick enough to mask most of the noise.
I've also got the Ridgeway 1km away which has some very peaceful bits.
The killer with all these places is airplanes! You can be in the middle of nowhere and still here the things.
Just to clarify ..I don't really mean ANY evidence of humans ..more that you hear no sound of the buggers ...just nature in all it's unspoilt glory.
IME it's more down to local geography. If you are in a little hollow it shields you from sound much better so it can be pretty quiet even if you aren't that far from a road. Similarly, being by a stream or river can block out traffic noise quite well.
We're surrounded by lots of nothing but it's clearly man-made. Old mining spoil, dry stone walls, planted forestry. Doubt there are many places in the UK. When we did a trip across the Australian outback we climbed Walga rock it's a slightly smaller Ayres rock without the tourists. You could see for tens of miles in every direction. Only sign of life was just being able to make out the track we drove in on. Proper empty
places where you can’t hear/see human activity ?
I am struggling with *any* part of the UK that has not seem human activity.
See:
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The quietest place I have been is in a cave.
I have had a couple of calm nights out that have felt like you could hear nothing.
A regular few nights with just waves, wildlife and wind.
Just to clarify ..I don’t really mean ANY evidence of humans ..more that you hear no sound of the buggers …just nature in all it’s unspoilt glory.
D'oh.
Din't read that bit.
I'm reluctant to delete nice pictures.
There are a few bits of original old growth caledonian forest in scotland but not much. some thick enough you could go into them and not see out.
But to get out of sight and sound of people? Can be done in the pentlands if you are lucky otherwise up north. One walking route I have done we didn't see anyone else for 3 days Achanshellach to strathcarron. Quite a lot of the trekking routes and canoeing trips I have done we haven't seen another person for a day or two but we deliberately pick places where this is likely
Parts of Northumberland I frequent.
But it's..., so I wouldn't...
Laying in bed or sat on the patio. Nearest neighbours best part of a mile away. At night I can see one other light in the valley about 3 miles distant.
About 20minutes walk from the front door puts me into big enough folds in the geography to be not able to see or hear cars /people etc.
A few miles unless the military are firing the big ass guns.
central london, so no chance.
suppose I could sit at the bottom of the Thames and not hear much.
Just to clarify ..I don’t really mean ANY evidence of humans ..more that you hear no sound of the buggers …just nature in all it’s unspoilt glory.
Well, thanks to a misspent youth enjoying the odd Rave, not far, sadly the buzzing is a bit off putting at times.
Without being a sarky sod though, not far, I can see 3 largish hills from my office windows, they've all got woods on them.
By sight, a couple of minutes walk.
Noise is a bit more difficult. I've camped out all over the Scottish Highlands and sound is very pervasive, especially at night. Traffic and train sounds carry a long way and can be affected by atmospheric conditions too. Then there's aircraft noise......
Many years ago a similar thread on STW ended up with a mate and I trying to find the place on the UK mainland furthest from a public road. We ended up at Maol Buidhe bothy.
Just hearing nature and nothing else is fairly easy, lots of spots within 25 miles of the M25 will give you that. To get away from all evidence of people would be a lot harder. I doubt there are many (any?) spots in the UK where there's no evidence of people.
On a good day, somewhere between Durley and Warnford (<12 miles), if I'm unfortunate enough to have the odd car pass me then near Butser Hill (<20 miles).
I want to say Riverside Park or Marhill Copse (<2 miles), but the odds of absolute solitude aren't great.
So long as there's no tractor work happening in the nearest field I'm less than 100m from a wood where there's no sign, sight or sound of human activity other than the trail I built through the wood. But even that I built subtly so as not to attract attention so it looks not a lot different from the deer tracks that have been there for decades.
300m in the oposite direction is another similar wood where no one other than me ever goes.
Just over a year about I'd say less than 100 miles to completely untouched by man, the first 80 would be easy to do, the last 20 would be an effort into the dense woods
If you just mean away from it all there are bits of quiet woodland and green space away from it all within a short ride of me, inside and outside the Manchester ring road
We should put together a list of grid references in case any of us ever need to dispose of a body.
Living in Galloway i figure i'm just a few hundred yards away from finding the ideal spot to bury all the people i have on my kill list, hang on....just added Christopher Chope to my list , i don't think i'll kill him though, a fatal wounding in the groin and left to bleed out will do.
The sofa opposite me where my wife sits tends not to have much activity
In the garden
I’m down in the south east corner BUT there’s a few places within a 20 minute ride that are utterly silent. They are mainly little hidden valleys on the edge of the Stour valley or out on the North Downs just south of Canterbury.
It’s a nice reminder that our perception of ‘crowded’ mainly comes through the prism of car travel.
If quiet is your criteria then we've got a semi-anechoic chamber at work. Suppose I could take a pot plant in for some nature.....
http://www.millbrook.co.uk/services/vehicle/semi-anechoic-chamber-nvh-testing/
Quiet outdoors can be very weather dependent. I've been at the top of Garburn in ear splitting silence, but then other times when the wind carried up the sound of all the cars driving alongside Windermere.
how far are you from places where you can’t hear/see human activity ?
Well I was in work today, yeah on a Friday! So I'm going to say from what I saw today I was fairly close to the OP's question.. 🤪
Though, that's not the spirit is it.
So, about 10min run from home to the beach. Hardly anyone along my little stretch until you get towards the carpark or the Pub the other end.
Other than that I've plenty of beaches minutes from home, so they count. Also the South Downs is a sneeze away so that counts too.
MOAB's pics look awfully like Paintings.. I wonder if they're hanging in his front room and he took a snap of them 👻
Dartmoor doesn’t count. I believe it used to be woodland once upon a time, cleared in pre-history for grazing/farming.
There is some ancient forest left, wistmans wood and black tor copse are the well known ones. Proper spooky places.
Some of the beaches on the north coast count and any human evidence gets washed away every tide, or washed in if the winds onshore...
Less than a minute by bike.
As I said above, the place I live in the middle of the Welsh hills, is pretty much silent most of the time. You can sit in a field, in the woods, on the hill, and hear nothing but the sound of birds and animals, or the wind in the trees...... EXCEPT..... something I realised during the flight bans when that Icelandic volcano erupted a few years back, there is a constant background noise form air traffic. Until that flight ban I hadn't realised just how pervasive the sound of aircraft is, 24/7. It is like living near a motorway. You soon learn to shut it out. Of course, there ar eplenty of active stream-filled cave passages where you can go that are 100% natural and have zero signs of human passage. Probably the closest you can get to a totally natural environment in the UK.
When I lived in North Wales lived in a house that pretty much fit this bill.
2 miles up a tiny road 1 neighbour another mile up the road and nothing else. Surrounded by woods and some sheep farmland.
Was silent pretty much all the time. Most noise was when the farmer ocaisonally moved his sheep around with a quad.
Could walk in the woods for hours knowing that there was no one else there.
When I’m with the outlaws in Spain it’s about 15mins to the mountains,depending where you are in them it’s pretty quiet and tbh being a city boy all my life its well strange.
Real mountains no moby signal great fun but could be very bad if not treated with respect an situational awareness.
With a decent wind I could climb the hill behind Largs and not see or hear anything but I'm too close to Glasgow not to hear aircraft on a still day.
Not far enough
I reckon I could cross the A3 and get to a quiet spot within 5 mins on me bike. Havant Thicket, it ain’t that big, it ain’t the wilderness by any means, but there are some parts in the middle where you could be anywhere. Might be some cows, but nothing else around.
Right now, I could walk out of my house and not hear any human activity 😁
The wind direction and strength is taking away any vehicle sounds from a rural A-road about half a mile away.
Norfolk, east of Norwich and close to the Broads.
I can see the hills above Welshfarmer, but from up there I won't be able to see his or home.
Used to live in an off grid house in the woods, remote from civilisation, just 5 minutes ride from the edge of Plymouth (so possibly still not that close to civilisation).
I live on the edge of the biggest city in the country. It takes me a while to get anywhere without any human activity.
Most places I go* I'd struggle not to hear myself breathing. It's a crying shame spoiling the nature of the surroundings oh god the humanity exclamation mark.
*edit - remote places, it's not like I can hear my wheeze above M25 traffic etc.
Arkengarthdale is pretty good, until the RAF appear.
I live in Hong Kong, its pretty crowded, on an island next to the airport, its a major airport. Even though over 60% of HK is country parks you would be hard pressed to find seclusion unless you really went off-piste, during the weekdays.
By car, 5 mins drive up the lane plus a few mins walk and I'm onto Mynydd y Gwair, between Swansea and the Brecon Beacons.
Which is nice.
When i find a moment of peace and true quiet, some dick on a stupidly loud motorbike feels it is their right to destroy it.
I really hate motorbikes outside of urban centres.
About 10 minutes, I reckon.
Over the river, past the Soviet war memorial, and off into the woods.
Although that particular wood is the result of past human activity. And current human activity might be heard (but not seen) in the form of planes flying over.
On to plan B: About 30 mins on the train in any direction, jump off, then ride to one of the numerous lakes that dot the proper old forests.
When i find a moment of peace and true quiet, some dick on a stupidly loud motorbike feels it is their right to destroy it.
I really hate motorbikes outside of urban centres.
I feel the same about planes.
Unless I’m on one in which case it’s perfectly justifiable.
If I ignore that the whole landscape in this country (pretty much) has been altered by human activity, then literally out of my back door. My nearest neighbours are 3 or 4 hundred yards away, but the lie of the land means I can't see them. What I can see is the Shropshire hills, woodland, pasture, lots of sheep and a pair of red kites circling above, causing my chickens to panic and hide in the bushes. I quite like it here.
A couple of hundred metres down the BW that runs past the house and I'm in a small secluded valley. Does depend on the time of year as to what I can see - if the trees are in full leaf then I can't even see our house or the house on the other side of the valley. Might be a bit noisy if the farmer is getting a cut of silage from the nearby fields.
We've a main road about a mile away but we don't hear the traffic unless there's particular atmospheric conditions which leads it to being a dull rumble/drone. Occasionally we can hear the trains on the line between Leeds - Skipton - Settle but again it depends on conditions.
There are lots of places in the UK where you can't see or hear any human activity for most of the time, three of my favourites: Great Moss in upper Eskdale in the Lakes; Fisherfield; the HT550 route between Gobernuisgach Lodge and Bealach Horn.
There are lots of places in the UK where you can’t see or hear any human activity for most of the time
and some really surprising ones like the area around Bank in the city of London on Boxing Day night!!
About this time last year I was staying in a hotel in Manchester having just moved and the beast from the east hit with it's massive warnings, I wandered back from dinner through a deserted city centre, quite, peaceful and still. It was bloody cold though!!
This popped up earlier. Not much sign of human influence...
https://twitter.com/bbcearth/status/1083729492571553792
Just to clarify ..I don’t really mean ANY evidence of humans ..more that you hear no sound of the buggers …just nature in all it’s unspoilt glory.
The paradox really is the further you get away from the sound of modern life the more apparent it is. I used to live is a cottage in a field in the middle the highlands and the first thing anyone said when they came to stay was 'its a shame you can hear the traffic'. The next place I lived was a flat on a corner in Glasgow which people described as 'eerily quiet'
When I lived up north I used to travel to London quite a lot and it was always surprised that while I could hear every car within a few miles from my house I could park at the London Gateway services on the M1 - facing the traffic and not be able to hear any of them - it seemed to be dead quiet.
As an aside... talking of quiet and distant noise. I've never been able to find it again... but there was a remarkable program on Radio 4 once by David Blunkett - he used to make recordings of 'the night' - exploring and describing the landscape by listening to sounds on the horizon. It was really, really lovely radio.
As a second aside... the reason you have fountains in city parks and squares isn't really for what they look like but what they sound like - they're white noise generators and block out the sound of the rest of city.
Locally, virtually no chance, Wiltshire is a big county, but there’s nowhere that’s really remote from any human influence.
About the nearest I ever got was just after the countryside access ban following the F&M outbreak ended, I took the bike over to Avebury and did a ride over to West Kennet longbarrow, then up onto the Ridgeway, across to Rockley, then picked up the byway that went across to Barbary Castle. At that moment, I don’t think anyone had realised the countryside was now open, and there wasn’t a soul about. I was sat on the bike, looking around, I couldn’t really see any houses, and apart from a motorbike way off in he distance I could only hear the wind and the birds, skylarks, crows, and a few others.
It was a remarkable sensation, the only other time I felt even more alone was in the Park du Volcans in France, and the cloud came down and smothered everything, there wasn’t a sound, no wind, no birds, just silence.