Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour - 2nd June 2026 (excerpt)

The forecast was for rain all day but after a period of a few hours with none I headed to Flatford. The clouds are great today and much more Constablesque with a wide variety of greys and shapes. As I was setting up there was some great interaction between some Song Thrushes, and some juvenile Moorhens on the water.
Some sightseers taking their photo with the Mill in the background, a Song Thrush again, a lady going past on her mobility scooter, restarting the recording because my alarm went off loudly and stopped the recording! Weird as I thought that the sound must have been coming from someone else’s phone before I realised it was from mine! Bees in the Comfrey, a Cuckoo, a couple take a photo, ask me what I was recording and then left straight away, then they came back and asked me if they could see Willy Lott’s House from this side of the river, a short rain shower with large drops, so I protect my kit with my cap and a cloth (well prepared!), a lad walking by with his hands in his pockets, the birds stopped singing after the ran, thunder, and now a Blackbird, the Cuckoo again as the wind picks up, the feeling that it’s going to lash it down, a man with 2 black Labradors walking past whilst looking at his phone the whole time, a hoverfly by the mic, a Moorhen, precipitation being blow from the willow trees above me, I’m on the edge of my seat with anticipation as the wind gusts and the thunder rolls around but the rain holds off, there are no hoards of tourists now as there were last week in the blazing sunshine (so I heard on various platforms), just crows, the storm is moving northward, swathes of cloud, gusts of wind bending the trees, pockets of blue sky now appear between the cloud, lightning to the west, ten seconds away, a Mallard on the mill pond, small spits of rain return as a man power walks past, we exchange nods, a man smoking a cigarette at the back of the Field Studies Centre looking over curiously, the same building that they said was out of bounds and as such I couldn’t record from there, wind ripples and rain drops on the water surface, three Magpies landing on the path to forage, there is two minutes to go until the hour is up and the rain is getting heavier, a jogger, the Mallard lands on the wall and stretches out its wings, several times, still some distant thunder and gusts in the trees but fading now, the Magpies chatter in the trees, the Cuckoo returns.