How many of you can hear traffic noise where you live?

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Patchworkpony

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Just bemoaning the quiet countryside of my youth. It seems that where ever you live in the country now you either have to deal with traffic (especially heavy farm vehicles) passing your property or you can hear busy roads in the distance. I was curious as to how many of you guys can hear traffic of some sort most of the time or do you live somewhere that is totally silent, except for the birds and sheep?
 
you can hear train from mine even though track 2 miles away. Also in a flight path for air base so have lots of RAF activity over house. Then there is the neighbour dogs that never ever stop barking. The sound I love is the donkey over the fields. Makes me chuckle
 
Can't get away from the sound of flipping tractors... But then I do live on a farm. I can't hear any roads which is usually bliss.

Honestly though? I can't imagine why you think you could live in the countryside and not hear heavy farm machinery - it is where it lives and belongs!!
 
Traffic all the time at home, but double glazing & curtains are great, so in the wniter hardly hear a thing.

At the yard: Have a local airfield as well as heavy traffic on the roads nearby - but learn to shut most out - and am lucky enough not to have to contend with the traffic as access straight out onto woodland & heathland :)
Still hear all the birds tho, particularly the owls at night & early morning :)
 
Neither my house (which is at the edge of town backing onto the woods) nor my yard which is in the middle or nowhere can really hear traffic. But the yard is surrounded by Scottish hills and sheep farms don't tend to have a lot of heavy machinery. Heavenly and quiet, except for the sound of sheep/cows.
 
I hear a lot we live about 40feet from the m2 motorway. In a strange way I find the noise quite comforting. It's very strange when it's closed and there is no traffic
 
There's a motorway about 1/2mile down the road & a train line at the back of the house. We can here them both but don't really notice them, or the main road which is 100yrds away x
 
We front on to a river and the other side of the river is an A road. I notice the noise less than the really heavy lorries shaking the house. For some reason I thought the river would stop that, it doesn't. It's still quieter here than our last house which was towards the end of the village so had lots of idiots anticipating the national speed limit zone and even though it was officially a back road the speed and noise of the cars was much worse.
 
Home hardly anything - I've been home for a couple of hours and two tractors have gone by, I consider that busy! Our village has a population of less than 500 and that includes all the outlying farms and houses so we're pretty titchy, not much going on. Our field is a mile outside the village - even at weekends you can go a couple of hours without any vehicles going past, which means I often ride for over an hour on the roads without meeting any traffic. If the wind is in a certain direction I can sometimes hear the A30 which is about five miles away, and we sometimes have planes turning near our field to land at Exeter airport ten miles away, and the air ambulance goes over us too (our field is next to a Dartmoor tor, which I guess is used as a point of reference). Non of the traffic I hear is intrusive - I actually get a kick out of being able to hear it in the distance, people rushing around going places whilst I'm chilling in the beautiful countryside.
 
We're on quite a busy B road, so yes, but the house is set back from the road quite a way, so it's not too bad, and only busy at peak times.
Ponies are very close to A34, so they have a more constant background noise. I don't think they care.
 
Yes, and screaming youths, but then I do live in the city :p

The only time you can hear the traffic where the horses are kept is when it's not windy. Which is never :p
 
Can't hear road traffic from the house, the drive is half a mile long, and trees and dips mean the road noise doesn't really reach us. It's not a particularly busy road anyway. We hear some farm machinery, especially at harvest time, but not a great deal. It's pretty peaceful here, except for the pheasants, ducks, geese, crows, owls, cattle and sheep - oh, and at the moment the shoots are a couple of times a week, that is pretty noisy, as are the bird scarers.

The field is on a very quiet single track lane next to a boarding school. There is noise from the school when the boys are out playing football, but other than that, it's quiet.
 
*hic* - we are on a back road but it used as a short cut. I find the small cars racing round the bends with broken exhausts the worst.


MadBlackLab - I So know what you mean about neighbour's dog. Thank God we've moved - the last place we lived in we were constantly woken up in the night by the farm dog across the road!
 
If the wind direction is right, I can hear the ''neenaw'' of the train. Line is about 2 miles away. From the horses, I can hear the A303, some days it is worse than others. From home, no major road noises, although sometimes large trucks rattle when they realise the 30mph zone! Normally quiet, sometimes the neighbours party music is a bit much!!!!!
 
I here about 2-3 cars a week going past my farm which Is lovely but I does make you incredibly suspicious of vehicles at night which I really don't like especially if someone is lost and turns around on my property grr.

I am lucky that the only access too my horses when they are turned out is either through 1mile of fields from the road or tough the farm so I don't tend to worry too much about someone trying to steal my horses you'd have to have been on the farm to know where they are but I worry so much if they are stabled over night as the yard is just up a small drive from the road so all stables have a padlock and I sleep with one ear open.

Does anyone else worry about their horses being accessible from the road? I tend not to leave much evidence to show they actually exist just incase. (I sound mental)

sorry to go off topic slightly..
 
Not really, I live in a smallish town and a fairly backstreety bit at that. Only really hear cars going up and down our road. Sometimes hear trains if the wind is in the right direction (railway is about half a mile away but very built up in between). Biggest noise nuisance is aircraft going into Heathrow but we're far enough out that we don't get them everyday and as they're at about 12,000 feet they aren't that noisy anyway.
 
Just tractors and birds for us! We live in a very rural farming area so don't get disturbed.

The only downside is getting young horses used to traffic - and I had someone come and try a horse a few mnths ago and despite riding out for 45mins couldn't find a car to prove the horse was safe in traffic!
 
Not a sound at home although we are urban. In the woods, though, it's very noticeable. The M1 is nearby and a junction of the M25 is right by the woods. I was very aware of the noise as I searched the woods til midnight last week for two very naughty springers. (Found them at midnight, phew!)
 
I find the song birds and my cockrel more noisy than the road, my dogs are a nightmare (fox, pheasant, postman, dust bin lorry etc. ! sorry if your my neighbours) - you hear the odd big truck but only if you stop and listen for the road. The raf typhoons however make the whole house shake! but luckily they are only once in a while.

When I lived in the centre of Reading in a cul de sac it was complete scilence all the time
 
Only ever hear traffic if it is an emergency services vehicle. We can however hear the trains, which are about a mile or a bit less from our house, and can occasionally hair airplanes.

The road I live on is semi rural. We have acres and acres opposite the front, and our dead end road leads to a cattle farm. Behind us are houses, but all the roads round us are cul de sacs.
 
We have hardly any traffic, and in general very little agricultural traffic. We live on a lane that turns into a bridleway, so its just the neighbours (about 20 houses) from the lane that use it. It is busy at schoolrun/going to or returning from work time, otherwise there is no traffic. Its very quiet and pitch black. There is an A road two fields away, but you don't hear much. Strangely, on nights when the ground is hard frozen you can sometimes hear the traffic on the M62, which is about ten miles away across the moors as the crow flies, and behind a hill.
 
Home (Somerset) not much. Main road a couple of hundred metres away but it's faint. Odd car on the road in front of ours.

Sheffield (where I am now for the vast majority of the year) not much. I live on a little dead end off a road near a busy town road. From my bedroom, which is on the back, I don't hear anything really, apart from emergency sirens, and they are faint.
 
I live on a cul-de-sac on an estate (not the posh sort, the other sort) so i really don't hear too much traffic tbh, except for my neighbours coming and going.

One of my horses lives on a farm that is slowly being eaten up by suburban sprawl and borders a motorway, sometimes the traffic there is quite loud, I will certainly feel sorry for the people trying to live in the houses they build there. tbh, it is more eerie when it stops for some reason!
 
At the yard we're under the flight path from Southampton airport, we get air traffic from a local airport and also RAF chinooks.

I can then hear traffic going through town if the wind is in the right direction. Or from a main A road if in a different direction. Sometimes I think I can even hear the A34 or M3 but I probably can't.

It's silly really because we're in the countryside on a farm!

At home I live on a road that cuts between two A roads and unfortunately gets a lot of people going to work etc so at peak times it can be quite busy. We also get a fair amount of lorries as there's a haulage company further up the road. There's a lottttt of tractors too. But I can't hear the main road unless it's a chavved up car, motorbike or emergency vehicle.

On special occasions/weekends/holidays I can hear the chuffing and whistling of the steam train the other side of the main road though!

We also get a fair amount of light aircraft and lots of RAF chinooks, sometimes they like to fly so low you can see the pilot inside.
 
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