"In 1986 I spent three months working 200 miles away in the slate quarrying area of North Wales around Mount Snowdon. A beautiful area - high mountains and steep valleys, remote sheep farms and in the distance, the Irish Sea, the sandy beaches of Ynys Mon (the island of Anglesey) and on the Llyn Peninsula, the Whistling Sands of Oer [nowadays more commonly written on the maps as Porth Oer, or Porthor]. The sands whistle, says the tourist brochure. I was convinced it must be something to do with the wind or the sea and kept listening harder and harder (if that's possible) but could hear nothing apart from waves, wind and a distant diesel generator. Maybe the weather wasn't right for sand whistling. Then a group of children ran past, and the sand was squeaking under their feet! So I ran too and the sand squeaked for me. Or creaked, I'm not sure which, but that must have been it, the whistling. After all, I reasoned, the "Squeaking Sands of Oer" wouldn't do much mileage as a tourist spot."

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A few years later, children would be running up and down making noise in Grizedale Forest, thanks to Will Menter's Ridding Wood Trail sculptures. His 'Millipede Marinmba' was a wavy structure similar to a xylophone, modelled after ancient African marimba, and was played by striking it with the attached drumstick-style piece of wood, although from what I remember most kids would just beat it with whatever stick came to hand. I'm pretty sure this and Menter's other sound pieces are one of the reasons I fell in love with this place. In a separate piece from the quote above, Menter wrote in 2006:

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"Between 1984 and 1998, in British schools I led workshops where children made their own instruments, and then made music with them. It was exciting and often anarchic. Most of the children loved making things but sometimes were frustrated that they couldn't achieve something as refined as the instruments they knew. The challenge of my role in these situations was to make them appreciate the value of what they had done. Use the instrument, even if it isn't perfect, and make sounds with it.

On playback, the groups were often surprised at how good their music sounded. What had seemed to them like a difficult mess when they were doing it, turned out to be worth listening to; to have a character of its own. So even if some of the instruments they had made fell apart as soon as the tape stopped rolling, there was some evidence of what they'd done, and in some way (small or not-so-small), their ways of listening had been challenged and developed."