Bant's Carn Tomb

We were staying in the Isles of Scilly for a few days, on St. Mary's. One afternoon, we walked up to Bant's Carn Tomb,  and had a notion that it would be a good idea to record the sounds of the sunrise from there. So, a couple of days later, we found ourselves getting up early, and leaving our holiday cottage just after three o'clock in the morning. In the darkness we stumbled over the rocky path up to the Halangy headland, before our torch ran out of battery and we were forced to navigate by the weak light of a  mobile phone. It took us nearly three quarters of an hour to walk the mile or so to the grave, and we congratulated ourselves on getting lost just once, and taking a wrong turning which brought us out at Telegraph Tower.
We finally found the grave, squatting near the top of the slope, its entrance facing towards the faint streak of light that was starting to appear on the horizon. We ducked inside. It was just starting to get light enough to make out the shapes of the rocks in the chamber, and my wife was able to set up her recording gear without too much trouble, attaching a couple of microphones to an old wire coat-hanger, and hanging it from a fissure in a rock just under one of the roof lintels.
Satisfied that everything was working properly, she went off to explore the headland, while I stayed in the chamber to keep an eye on the equipment - you never know who's abroad at this hour - and to  watch the gradually lightening sky.

I made myself comfortable, and sat and listened to the dawn, and the hypnotic white noise of the Atlantic waves crashing into Halangy Point and Little Creeb. After a while, I realised there was a slight humming sound, like somebody blowing across the top of a bottle. Or was it like a small swarm of bees? What was it? It didn't seem to be the wind blowing in through the gaps of the tomb...perhaps it was the radio transmitter a few hundred yards away to the east? Sometimes the hum was there, sometimes it wasn't. Perhaps it was just in my head.

My wife returned. At first she said she couldn't hear anything, and the recordings hadn't seemed to have picked anything up - but then, there it was, an intermittent low hum.

A bee flew into the chamber. No, it wasn't that. A different kind of hum.

Eventually it stopped. The sounds of the morning became louder. A twin-engine plane flew overhead, a motorised boat headed out towards St. Martin's, and a car drove down Telegraph Road.

The day had begun.