x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Open Country

Countryside magazine featuring the people and wildlife that shape the landscape of the British Isles

science nature

All Episodes

24:29

Bellaghy - Seamus Heaney's Homeplace

Open Country ·

2016/09/08

Seamus Heaney grew up in Bellaghy in Northern Ireland and his poetry features many of the people who lived there and the views he saw there. Helen Mark visits Bellaghy to discover the real places which inspired so many well loved words and meets the people who live there to find out what Heaney's work means to them.

en

24:36

Hoylake: Green Belt and Greens

Open Country ·

2016/09/01

A new golf resort has been proposed for Hoylake in Wirral. Helen Mark explores how this will affect the local green belt and the birdlife and wildlife that live there. Helen speaks to Andrew Needham from the Council for the Protection of Rural England about what constitutes green belt land and why a golf course may be permissible. John Hutchinson from the Hoylake Golf Resort Committee talks about his opposition to the resort and how it will destroy a much-loved piece of land. Dr Hilary Ash takes

en

24:49

Helen Baxendale visits Belper in Derbyshire

Open Country ·

2016/08/25

Guest presenter Helen Baxendale visits Belper in Derbyshire, to explore the landscape for traces of the town's industrial past. Belper is part of the Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site (as designated by UNESCO in 2001), so she expected to find the river-power and the ironstone that made the town a perfect site for Jedediah Strutt to locate his mills in the eighteenth century. More surprising is the vibrant artistic scene and a large helping of community spirit whose roots can be traced back

en

24:19

Spurn Point Lifeboat Station

Open Country ·

2016/08/18

Helen Mark spends the day wit the only full-time lifeboat crew in the UK, based on Spurn Point. This unique landscape is a strip of land, 3.5 miles long and only 50m wide in places. Until recently the station was occupied by the station staff and their families, but the fragility of the Spurn Point sandbank that links it to the mainland means it is no longer fit for so many people. And if you want to visit, you have to park up and walk 3 miles, since the storms of 2013 washed parts of the road

en

24:25

The 'Man Engine' in Cornwall's mining landscape

Open Country ·

2016/08/11

The largest mechanical puppet ever made in the UK "The Man Engine" has been striding out across Cornwall to celebrate 10 years since Cornwall's mining landscapes were awarded the status of UNESCO world heritage sites. Standing 10 metres high this 'Man Engine' will visit each of the 10 heritage areas across Cornwall and Helen Mark meets him and his creator Will Coleman in Liskeard and Minions on Bodmin moor. Helen speaks to some of the people who live here about what tin mining means to them today

en

24:20

Orkney Wildlife in Crisis

Open Country ·

2016/08/04

The Orkney Isles are one of the best places for wildlife in the country. Species such as seals and puffins which are hard to find in other parts of the UK can often be spotted in Orkney with ease. Helen Mark visits to discover for herself the incredibly rich beaches, cliff tops and moorland on the islands. Despite the display of rare species on offer Helen finds that even here marine life is increasingly threatened by an array of problems and once thriving populations are now in decline. She talks

en

24:24

Capability Brown at 300

Open Country ·

2016/07/28

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown is heralded as the Shakespeare of gardening who in the eighteen century designed an estimated 170 landscapes including Blenheim Palace, Warwick Castle and Highclere Castle. To mark the 300th anniversary of his birth, Helen Mark discovers how his naturalistic landscapes changed the face of the countryside in the eighteenth century and continue to endure today. She visits Wrest Park in Bedfordshire to identify the trademarks of a classic Capability Brown landscape and finds

en

24:25

Biodiversity at Heathrow

Open Country ·

2016/07/23

Helen Mark visits Heathrow Airport to discover what steps they take to encourage biodiversity and assesses the impact the proposed third runway will have should the decision be made for it to go ahead. Heathrow has thirteen sites of Conversation, and Helen speaks to to the Airport's Biodiversity Manager Adam Cheeseman about the species he finds there including the Black Bee. Environmental Operations Manager Russell Knight explains how they've encouraged fish species to return to their rivers, and

en

23:45

The Dolphins of Cardigan Bay

Open Country ·

2016/07/14

Patrick Aryee travels to West Wales to meet the dolphin-watchers of New Quay, and to encounter some members of the largest group of bottlenose dolphins off the coast of the UK.New Quay is home to the Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre, which was set up in 1996 by Steve Hartley, a former fisherman, because he wanted people to know about the amazing array of marine wildlife he saw from his fishing boat. Fishing trips turned into dolphin-watching trips, and now Steve takes researchers out regularly to

en

24:23

Bishop Auckland, History in Production

Open Country ·

2016/07/07

'Kynren' is set across a landscaped stage which is the size of 5 football pitches and involves over 1000 local volunteers. Organizers hope that it will transform Bishop Auckland and bring many visitors to the area for years to come. The story will explore 2000 years of British history from Roman times through the Saxons and Vikings to Industrial times and beyond. Helen Mark hears from the local volunteers about what it means to them and discovers the real history behind Bishop Auckland. She visits

en

24:25

Midsummer Music in Orkney

Open Country ·

2016/06/30

Orkney has a great heritage of music so for this weeks Open Country Helen Mark visits the St Magnus International Festival of Music and Arts. Now in its 40th year St Magnus was founded by the late Orkney-based composer, and Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. This years festival will celebrate his legacy as well as shining a light on new talent from the islands. During the summer months Orkney enjoys 'Twilight All Night' due to its latitude, Helen discovers what this means for the

en

24:24

Dawn Chorus across Europe

Open Country ·

2016/05/12

Brett Westwood presents a special programme as Open Country joins forces with the European Broadcasting Union and RTE in Ireland to follow the Dawn Chorus from East to West across Europe.Sunday 1 May was International Dawn Chorus Day and from midnight until six am, Brett Westwood sat in RSPB Ham Wall in Somerset broadcasting about what he heard. The silence of the night is broken by belching Moorhens, booming Bitterns and even a Marsh Frog before Dawn breaks to reveal a huge cast of Coots, Little

en

24:23

Tennyson's Lincolnshire

Open Country ·

2016/05/05

Helen Mark explores the Lincolnshire Wolds through the poetry of Victorian Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.The Lincolnshire Wolds are a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, remote and in some ways little-changed since Tennyson was born here, in the village of Somersby, in 1809.Helen meets dialect speakers, like Tennyson, whose 'first language was Lincolnshire'. She'll find out how he might have described the landscape and how it appears in some of his dialect poems. She meets some rare

en

24:33

Southwell Races, Nottinghamshire

Open Country ·

2016/04/25

Helen Mark spends a day at Southwell Races in rural Nottinghamshire. It's one of the smallest and most rural racetracks in Britain, but it's also one of the busiest.Helen follows a day in the life of the race-track, meeting some of the people who make it happen. She talks about dreams and 'babies' (two year old horses) with trainer David Brown as one of his horses has a swim in the pool. There are the Travelling Stable Lasses, jockey Andrew Mullen (no, he hadn't eaten anything all day), racehorse

en

24:14

The National Forest: 25 Years

Open Country ·

2016/04/22

Helen Mark visits the National Forest as its marks 25 years since it started to create huge areas of woodland.The entire area covers 200 square miles across the boundary of the East and West Midlands over the three counties of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire. Helen explores how this regeneration through nature has impacted upon the lives of the people in the area.She begins by planting our very own 'Open Country' oak tree. Producer: Perminder Khatkar.

en

24:27

Old Oswestry Hillfort

Open Country ·

2016/04/21

Helen Mark visits the Iron-Age Hillfort in Oswestry, Shropshire to discover why it's the "Stonehenge of the Iron Age" and how plans for housing might affect the landscape. Dr Rachel Pope tells Helen why the size and scale of the Western entrance ramparts help make the Hillfort one of the most important Iron-Age monuments in England, and why it's a symbol for community and trade rather than defence. Dr George Nash explains how the site was used to train soldiers in trench warfare and mortar practice

en

23:55

Gainsborough's Nodding Donkeys

Open Country ·

2016/04/13

Forget Texas! There's oil in the plains of Lincolnshire. But not many people seem to notice.Helen Mark travels to the market town of Gainsborough to discover more about the nodding donkeys that pepper its landscape. Oil wells sit comfortably fringed by a housing estate, the leisure centre and the golf course.It turns out that the East Midlands is the UK's second largest inshore oil producing area, courtesy of the Gainsborough Trough, once a deep and dirty patch of sea. Now it produces twelve hundred

en

24:39

Welsh Valleys after Coal

Open Country ·

2016/03/04

Felicity Evans asks how the valleys of south Wales near Caerphilly have fared since the mines closed. She visits new parklands that have been planted where the collieries once stood.She begins at Senghenydd, site of two mining disasters just one hundred years ago, one of them the worst ever experienced at a UK mine. Former teacher in the village and now a broadcaster, Roy Noble reflects on the legacy of the disaster, and how it's still remembered even though a primary school has been built on the

en

24:23

Return to the Fens

Open Country ·

2016/02/11

In the final episode of this series Helen Mark visit Woodwalton Fen in Cambridgeshire with writer Simon Barnes to discover the lost landscape which inspired Charles Rothschild to draw up the Rothschild list. This list of wild places in need of preservation helped establish modern conservation ideas and in 1912 Rothschild established the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves for Britain and the Empire, the first society in Britain concerned with protecting wildlife habitats. Today the bungalow

en

24:44

Scowles in the Forest of Dean

Open Country ·

2016/01/28

Helen Mark is in the Forest of Dean in search of mysterious geological formations known as 'scowles'.These semi-natural features in the landscape are thought to be unique to the Forest of Dean but are plentiful in this area. They are crater-like features in the woodland that have been eroded over time by water-action and exploited by miners through the centuries for their bounty: iron-ore, coal, and ochre have all been found in abundance in the Forest of Dean.Helen descends into the mysterious,

en

334 results

Similar Podcasts

Classic Radio Science Fiction

solgoodmedia.com

Mission to Mars

Inception Point Ai

The 365 Days of Astronomy

365DaysOfAstronomy.org

Creek Devil

william Jevning

UFO Chronicles Podcast

Nik Hunter