If you were asked where the quietest place in Britain was, what would be your answer? You might say it all
depends. Where there is least noise? Where there are no sounds of human activity? Are caves or disused mines included? But what about the weather; it can be noisy anywhere. The wind, the rain, and storms. And the sea is not silent, with the slamming of the waves against the cliffs. Neither is wildlife quiet, especially the screeching and chirping of birds. If you allow for the sounds of nature and look for places far away from human activity, then there must be hundreds of places in the highlands of Scotland that would qualify, and the same goes for a lesser number of places in mid-Wales, RAF training flights allowing. No, the quietest place must be all about remoteness from the racket made by us humans, and that must include flight paths of civil aircraft. If the highlands of Scotland and much of mid-Wales are excepted, then finding the quietest spot in crowded England might be more of a challenge.
The anechoic chamber at the University of Salford, a room within a room built on rubber springs, is lined from floor to ceiling with soft foam wedges which absorb any vibrations in the air.
The quietest place ought also to be somewhere that can be visited, that isn’t private or unduly dangerous. So the further reaches of the many cave systems or abandoned mines in Britain should be discounted. And deadly silent man-made places such as the University of Salford’s ‘anechoic’ chamber (meaning non-reflective of sound), which is so quiet that you can hear the sound of your blood circulating in your head, or the quiet room at the British Standard Institute laboratories in Hemel Hempstead, where apparently fire alarms are tested; these places surely don’t qualify.
Mapping Tranquility
In March 2005, the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) published a report Mapping Tranquility that sought to define and identify not the quietest places, which as discussed above, are not what they seem, but the places which were the most tranquil. England was divided into 500m by 500m squares and each square was given a tranquillity score, based on 44 different factors which add to or detract from people’s feelings of tranquillity. It was hoped that this ambitious project would help safeguard the English countryside from future development. The top ten factors that people said represented tranquillity were:
1. Seeing a natural landscape
2. Hearing birdsong
3. Hearing peace and quiet
4. Seeing natural looking woodland
5. Seeing the stars at night
6. Seeing streams
7. Seeing the sea
8. Hearing natural sounds
9. Hearing wildlife
10. Hearing running water
As a result of the survey, the CPRE in 2006 created a national tranquillity map based on the 500m by 500m squares, and they said that the most tranquil place in England was in the Kielder Forest in Northumberland. But the exact spot was kept secret, to keep it tranquil.
You can download the tranquillity map here, and see what else the CPRE has to say about tranquil places here.
The Most Tranquil Place
This is a map of the approximate location of the Kielder Mires National Nature Reserve, in which, somewhere, lies the ‘quietest place in England’. © Ordnance Survey
However since then, Trevor Cox, Professor of Acoustics Engineering from the same Salford University, and a presenter of many popular science documentaries on television and radio, has gone to England’s most tranquil spot. The CPRE told Professor Cox which 500m by 500m square in the Kielder Forest had been identified as the spot, and he went there, trekking along forester’s tracks and wading through a mile and a half of peat bog.
In January 2014, the most tranquil place in England was described as a hillock in the Kielder Mires, two hours walking distance from the nearest human settlement, a Victorian grouse shooting lodge, and ten miles from the village of Gisland. As well as its distance from human habitation, the distance of the place from flight paths, was a key factor in making it the most tranquil spot.
The Kielder Mires
This is Bellcrag Flow, one of the border mires in the southern part of Kielder Forest, typical of what you might see in the ‘most tranquil place in England’. Border Mires are areas of peatland up to 10 metres deep which have developed on the site of shallow lakes since the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago. © Les Hull / Creative Commons Licence
The Kielder Mires are formed of two deep peat mires known as Grain Heads Moss and Coom Rigg Moss. The mires are part of a collection of more than 50 recognised peat bodies known as the Border Mires which are mostly located within the boundaries of Kielder Forest. These blanket mires are rare globally, as they have been largely destroyed by plantations, drainage and grazing. The mires in Kielder are acidic, low-nutrient environments fed entirely by rain and provide refuge for rare species such as tall bog sedge, lichens and sphagnum mosses. Less is known about the natural fauna, although the area is rich in invertebrates and merlins, Britain’s smallest birds of prey, breed on the edge of the plantations. For these reasons the Kielder Mires been designated as a National Nature Reserves (NNR), a Special Areas of Conservation (SAC), and a Ramsar site, that is wetlands of international importance under the Ramsar Convention, an international treaty signed in 1971.
So Professor Cox became the first person to knowingly visit this most peaceful spot, though humans must have struggled through the mires unknowingly many times over the last 10,000 or more years. Later, Cox wrote in his book Sonic Wonderland – A Scientific Odyssey of Sound, that ‘I had previously thought of asking the CPRE if I could publish the location of the quietest place, but I realised this would be a bad idea’.
But in the 1950s, something was going on less than six miles away that had the potential to shatter the peace of the Kielder Mires.
Spadeadam – A Near Miss
In the late 1950s, the then Ministry of Aviation built a secret base just across the Cumbrian border from the Kielder Forest at Spadeadam. This was to test the government’s Blue Streak rocket, which it was hoped would provide Britain with an independent medium-range ballistic nuclear missile. The first rocket firing took place in August 1959, but already by then, it was realised that the missile was vulnerable to a pre-emptive strike because of the time that it took to fuel the rocket. To overcome this, ministers approved the digging of a deep silo, known as U1, which was to be the first of sixty underground launch sites throughout Britain. However the difficulty of finding suitable sites for the silos and the escalating costs led to the abandonment of the Blue Streak missile programme in 1960. Later in 1977 as an RAF base, Spadeadam became NATO’s first full-scale electronic warfare tactics range in Europe.
This is one of the two massive concrete stands at the RAF’s missile base at Spadeadam in Cumbria that were used to test fire the Blue Streak rocket in the late 1950s.
When tree-felling in the Spadeadam forest uncovered remains of the abandoned excavations for the missile silo, the site’s role in Britain’s Cold War nuclear weapons programme was made public in 2004. English Heritage and the RAF surveyed the 900 acre site. As well as control bunkers, three huge concrete engine testing stands, and two stands used for the static test firing of rockets, the noise from which would have been deafening, still remained in place. The test site at RAF Spadeadam was designated as a listed building in October 2013.
So just six miles separate England’s most tranquil place from what might have become Britain’s first underground missile launch site, which could have unleashed Armageddon as a consequence.
Other unusual places of interest in Britain:
The Centre of Great Britain
The oldest of the oldest rocks
Most featureless place
Furthest point from a road
Lowest point on land