Mallinson Ltd - woodwork courses in Dorset. Perfect short breaks for everyone.

Last week saw two courses come and go and we were blessed with glorious weather. It was great to see so many people wandering back from the woods with the fruits of their labours having had, to quote one guest, "a uniquely relaxing time". As Mace mentions in his 'In The Woods This Month' feature, everything is bursting into life now. Around the woodland workshop the bluebells are springing up everywhere and taking over from the wild garlic. And soon, nestling amongst it all, there'll be Totem Poles.

Pole Carving

Yep, Pole Carving. No, nothing to do with pole dancing - we're talking Totem Poles! On top of the two new courses we launched last month, this month sees us introducing a Totem Pole carving course. Karen Hansen (who you might have met co-presenting some of the Bowl Carving courses with me), is a very talented wood carver and this course is based on her experience of carving Totem Poles.

The choice of what to carve is up to you - you might go for something figurative or something more abstract and doubtless there'll be some surprises too. Whatever guests decide, Karen and I are looking forward to seeing a whole variety of sculptures being made, that will enjoy long lives in gardens all over the country.

The first dates are October 18th-19th and the cost is £293.75 including VAT. You can book in the normal way - by 'phone (01308 485111) or via the booking page on this web site.

More Horse Power

Following Mace's enthusiastic report on extracting timber with horses (in the February newsletter) I had to find out more for myself. So, the other week I spent a memorable afternoon with Mace and Charlie (the horse) extracting Ash from nearby woods for all three of the most recent courses. It was brilliant!

The peaceful nature of this work and the lack of damage to the forest floor made it a very satisfying time. What's more, the knowledge that our green wood was being extracted in the greenest way possible was real icing on the cake. Even the wild garlic that surrounds the woodland workshop and carpets the woods where we were extracting went unscathed by the whole process. There's no escaping it - that's the way forward and we'll be doing more of the same in the future.

Less Horse Power

On course days we have to get the wood, the tools and the food down to the woodland workshop. Our old mini tractor does the job very well but to date we've been running it on red diesel - which is cheap but puts out an awful lot of black smoke on start-up.

Now, while I really liked working with Charlie in the woods, I'm not sure if a horse drawn cart is the best solution for quick jaunts up and down the fields. So, in a less drastic effort to be as green as we sensibly can, we've now converted the tractor to biodiesel. A local company -

http://www.bridport-tlc.org.uk/

is supplying us and that means we've now exchanged diesel fumes for the smell of chip fat! OK, we've lost a few horse-power in performance but that's not worrying us at all and we admit the smell isn't exactly rustic, but it's an improvement!

Country Living

Kate Langrish's article on the Kitchen and Garden Pole Lathe Turning course came out this month in Country Living and we were delighted to read how much she'd enjoyed her two days in the woods. This is the second article they have released about us and we are very grateful for their support and enthusiasm for what we are trying to do here. Let's hope that the new courses announced last month and above prove as popular as the now well-established ones. (You can read the article on our 'In The News' section.)

And that's it for another month. Before I hand over to Carolyn and Mace, I'll say it again ... if you're planning on coming down for a course do book soon: places are limited and once we're booked-up, we're booked-up. (I don't mean to nag, but I don't want you to be disappointed either.)

Thanks for reading.

Guy and the team

Tree Of The Month: Hawthorn

After the promise of early spring, April brings a sudden explosion of verdant green growth - the masses of flowers and new leaves, the warm scent of wild garlic in woods and lanes a powerful and uplifting manifestation of the life-force.

As April moves into May and the peak of Spring activity pushes into the beginning of summer, Beltane, the Celtic festival of fire and fertility, is celebrated at the midpoint of the sun's progress between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice. Traditionally, this was the night of the 'greenwood marriage', whereby people spent the night in the woods and made love to celebrate the union of the horned god and the green goddess, to ensure the continuing fertility of the land. Hawthorn - Crataegus monogyna, the May tree, is traditionally associated with Beltane, which falls at the end of April / beginning of May.

Hawthorn is a tree of wild places, long believed to be the haunt of faeries, and strongly associated, even today, with the old festivals. The maypole dance on May Day, itself a plainly symbolic celebration of the interweaving of male and female energies, danced to celebrate and ensure fertility at this time of intense growth, harks back to a much earlier tradition in which a living tree, probably a Hawthorn, would be bought to the village for a ceremony to ensure a fruitful harvest. The living tree would still contain its tree spirit, or dryad, which would be invoked in the ceremony to ensure the continuing fertility of the land.

Garlands of Hawthorn blossom were, and still are used to decorate doorways, dancers and maypoles, hence 'here we go gathering knots in May' rather than nuts, which are out of season. While being widely used for outside decoration, it has always been thought to be unlucky to bring Hawthorn blossom inside the house as it presaged a death; in fact the Welsh name for the flowers, Blodau marw mam, literally means 'flowers death mother'.

As the pagan fertility festival of May Day was Christianised, with a virginal May Queen who was also associated with the Virgin Mary, so Hawthorn also became associated with Catholicism. When England was Catholic, Mayflowers were bought into the house to decorate an altar to Mary; after the Reformation, the new national Puritanism made this practise illegal and dangerous.

Historically, Hawthorns are strongly identified with old sacred sites and the faerie world, marking sacred groves, springs, and faerie places. The trees, although often shrubby and stunted, can live for up to four hundred years, and are strong landscape features; furthermore, their sacred and faerie associations meant that roads and buildings were redirected around the trees to avoid bad luck. This importance is reflected in the fact that the hawthorn is the most commonly-mentioned tree in Anglo-Saxon boundary charters, and is also the tree most commonly named in English place-names. Later, Hawthorn became widespread due to hedge planting carried out in the wake of the enclosure acts, when an estimated 200,000 miles of hawthorn hedge were planted, permanently changing both landscape and land usage.

Carolyn Brightwater

In The Woods This Month - It's Spring!

Cor! Blimey! Isn't it all just bursting? Well ... the felling season has ended, so Phil and myself (and the horses) are busy finishing off the remnants of timber extraction. This is the point at which the extracted wood is scrutinised and sorted into its highest value usage.

Categories include: coppice whips/poles/rods, large diameter straight grained saw-mill stems, 'craft-grade' stems and sections (i.e. straight grained and suitable for cleaving, but not big enough for economical milling), cordwood (firewood timber which is so-called after the unit of measure - a 'cord' being a stack of 4' lengths, 4' high, 8' wide) with all the off-cuts and remnants being stacked for charcoal burning later in the summer.

Any unusual bits and bobs, such as walking stick material, honey suckle twists, tripods (an evenly spaced three-way fork upturned to make a portable chopping block), gnarly bits for rustic furniture making etc., are usually separated when noticed. Here's a tip; never walk away from a stick that will make a good walking stick, cut it there and then ... you'll never find it again!

Experiencing the day-to-day changes in the woodland at this time of year is utter soul food. It is a privilege to notice coppice stools which you have cut that season putting forth their tentative new buds and shoots; an honour to hear the early morning bird song gain in ardent intensity from day to day; a heart warming and inspiring relief to see the tenacity with which wildlife reclaims and adapts to its changed surroundings (wrens foraging through the log piles, robins and blackbirds nesting in the brash piles, marsh tits nesting in newly exposed stumps, woodpeckers hammering away on the habitat stems that you made a point to leave although it would have been easier to fell them, a stoat emerging from a recently created deadwood habitat pile ... ); the invigorating first waft of dew on new ramsons, buds breaking everywhere and the warmth of the sun on your back ... and then the moment arrives; the dawning realisation that all the grunting drudgery, the repetitive back breaking slog, the mud, the rain, the wind, the aches and the dark inner battles with motivation and enthusiasm ... all of these were worth it to feel this moment of connectivity, to be a part of the cycle.

Mace Brightwater