Welcome to the Fern podcast as the season turns. I'm Leah Lane Derns, and I'm delighted to introduce this found sound for October, created by musician and sound artist Alice Boyd.

For this year's found sounds, Alice travels across the UK to meet people inspired by heritage crafts, folklore and the landscape, creating a sonic scrapbook of their practice.

This month, Alice visits multidisciplinary artist and writer Caroline Ross in Hexham, Northumberland.

Caroline works with foraged, ancient and repurposed materials, making paints, inks and tools

that root craft in the natural world. Her books, found and ground and drawn from the wild, explore this close relationship

between materials, creativity and place. You may wish to pause the podcast here for a moment,

while you find somewhere warm and quiet to close your eyes, sit back and settle down into this month's

found sound. So Caroline, can you introduce yourself and describe your work?

I suppose I'm an artist, although for many years I had an issue calling myself that,

but I'm also a writer, I make things I make a lot of

things whether that's music or pigments, inks or books and so apparently the word for that is

multi-disciplinary artist but I'd never thought to call myself that till about a month ago. And where are we today?

We're in Hexham, a place where I have lived for five days.

And I've come here for love, a place, and of a person.

And so it feels like the most wonderful time to be rooting and nesting in the autumn with the trees around us.

And right now we're in this amazing bandstand and we're in this park in the middle of Hexham.

What are we here to do?

Well, hopefully there'll be some oak gulls.

So we're surrounded by beautiful

beach trees and really large oaks. And this year has been an interesting year for ink makers

in England because there's hardly any round gulls, the ones that lit like little marbles,

which traditionally people think of if they imagine an oak gul. But there are millions of nopagals which look like a little exploding, almost like little asteroids.

...