'Dovenby' is 'Dufan's bȳ' or 'Dufan's hamlet or village'. 'Bȳ' is late Old English, from Old Norse 'býr'. The personal name 'Dufan' "is of Irish origin (OIr 'Dubhán'), a diminutive of 'dubh', 'black', but it is on record from Iceland."

Dovenby is a small village between the Lake District National Park and the Solway Firth in West Cumbria. The village is part of a small network of other villages including Bridekirk, Tallentire, Broughton Moor, Great Broughton, Little Broughton and Dearham and is home to around 4000 people. 

The following sound stream captures soundscapes from the places in and around these villages. The landscape tells a story of agriculture and industry and features abandoned quarries, roman roads, unused footpaths, lonnings, an open cast coal mine turned nature reserve and an abandoned MOD/NATO armaments dump currently being converted into a housing estate named Utropia. The following sounds have all been recorded over the past four weeks using Fel Clippy XLR EM172 microphones on a coat hanger. 

*lonning (cumbrian dialect word for Lane) 

This project is kindly supported by Full of Noises, Barrow-in-Furness as part of the acoustic commons project:
http://fonfestival.org/