Sea dramatics on cliffs around Zawn Wells, near Land's End (upper position)

Majestic chunky waves ride in and hit the cliffs broadside-on, with heavy thuds and impressive splashdowns from the plumes or walls of spray that shoot up, with beautifully discreet atmospheric foghorn (actually 'whistle') tone coming into and out of focus.

This is the upper of two concurrent recordings I made here on 12 March 2014, near Land's End, Penwith, Cornwall, UK. This one directly overlooks Zawn Wells, a quite narrow small inlet, while the other one was a little lower and 'round the corner' off to the left, just a little down the cliff slope, and rather blocked off from the sea action in Zawn Wells, and capturing instead a lot of heavy rumbling from sea action against the cliff directly below there.

I hurried like a bat out of hell from my early afternoon recording session at Zawn Rinny, by Gwennap Head, for I realized that there could be super-duper sea dramatics around Zawn Wells, and made it from the former in just an hour, with my quite heavy rucksack making that quite an achievement for me. But as I was getting near I had a heart-sink moment and disappointment, for I realized that the Longships 'foghorn' was sounding. I'd have welcomed a real foghorn — they have style! — but the bland little rather high-pitched 'whistle' really made it pointless to record.

When I arrived, overlooking Zawn Wells, the sea dramatics were great, but that dratted 'foghorn' was continuing, repeating every 10 seconds. I was about to pick up my pack again and make for the Land's End car park to start my return hitch-hike to Exeter, but prudently checked that choice by means of a procedure I nowadays call Helpfulness Testing (look that up in my Glossary page), and got a strong indication that, regardless of how I was feeling about that confounded 'foghorn', it would be much better that I still spend an hour making two concurrent recordings here as though there were no such issue.

However, once the recording was running, I started getting tingling up my spine, and beginning to recognise that I might be getting something really special here. It was reminding me of the musical 'device' I'd used in movement 3 of my Symphony 6, where I had a high D tone running through most of that movement, which gave the music (a symbolic battle of humans against 'the elements' on the mountain K2) a strange 'metaphysical' quality and sense of some powerful 'higher' purpose. Similarly here, that eerie distant whistle tone drifting in and out of audibility was giving the impression of intensifying the sense of drama, and suggesting some deep metaphysical aspect of it all. On editing the recordings afterwards I found that impression was reinforced.

I did have one regret, though. I noticed how both recordings had failed to reproduce clearly the movement of the waves from left to right; there was only a vague impression of that happening. — It wasn't till 2016, when I started using the PCM-D100 recorder, that I realized how atrocious the M10's stereo imaging really was. How I then wished for being able to repeat that spectacular with the D100 and hear the exact position of each wave as it moves across the soundstage! I did enhance the stereo image of both recordings with software, but they're still nothing like they'd be if they'd been recorded with the D100.

Unfortunately, it would be a quite rare occurrence that a sufficiently large swell would accompany very light local wind and offshore sea fog, so the chances of my being able to get a repeat performance, especially with the fog 'horn', would be virtually nil.

Advisory

For a reasonable approximation to the loudness of the original soundscape, a playing volume of 3dB above a normal sensible volume level is needed.

High-grade headphones are particularly recommended in order to hear all the detail. Also, because the stereo imaging has been enhanced, that may cause a certain phasiness or phase cancellation points when you listen through certain speakers, whereas that effect doesn't occur when listening through headphones.

From the upper recorder position, overlooking Zawn Wells (inlet on right), during this recording.

From same position, getting the view out to the Land's End complex.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-M10, with just one furry windshield — a Røde DeadKitten (original, more effective, version) —, and placed on a full-size Zipshot tripod.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and more recent processing with the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin (160% widening).

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!