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

Last month's newsletter saw me talking about glorious weather ... Looking out the window now, all I can say is that I hope that wasn't all the summer we're going to get!

New Dates

Sneaking onto the web site between the last newsletter and this one, we've added a couple more dates to our course schedule.

Days For Children and Adults - Saturday, 18th August
Introducing Green Woodwork - Friday, 5th October

Although both August and October feel like yonks away, the way of things these days means both are going to come around sooner than you think! So, if either course interests you, book shortly in the usual way - by 'phone or via the web site.

(To clear up one potential confusion - our "Introducing Green Woodworking" course is NOT a prerequisite for coming on any of the other courses - it's intended to be a way for people to dip a toe in the water for just one day.)

Tears Before Bedtime

I know, I know ... but it's true. If you've half a mind to do a course - book as soon as you can.

I feel like I'm always saying this (probably because I am) but I can't stress enough that places are limited and once a course is full, it's full. Our June and July courses are already very nearly completely booked-up. May's bowl-carving one was sold out and I had to turn down two would-be late bookers. If I do drone on about booking early, it's only because I'm trying to spare any wobbling bottom lips and tears before bedtime!

Send In Your Photos / Win A Course

(Can't say fairer than that.)

We are always looking out for new and better photos of the courses 'in action' as it were and of guests with the results of all their hard work, and we see lots of you good people snapping away while you're here.

Putting two-and-two together, we think it might be good idea to have a competition for everyone who's been on a course, with a free course as the prize. This can either be the same course again (which seems to be quite a popular thing to do) or any other one as takes your fancy.

So, to enter, all you have to do is send in any photos you have of what you've made, of the course or of the woodland workshop. We hope you agree that's not too difficult! Just email them (if they're not too huge) to guy@mallinson.co.uk or post them to us - on ROM if they're in digital format. Presuming we get enough entries (let's say, from 15 or more people) we'll then select any we like and publish them on a new page on the web site - a guests' gallery.

In a year's time - May 2008 - we'll then review all the photos and select a winner - which will simply be my favourite picture! Yes, the criteria are vague but that's deliberate - we'd like to see photos that are informal or arty, amusing or suitable for a press release, in fact, anything that you think looks good.

(I guess the only small print I have to include apart from the minimum number of entries to make this viable is that my decision as judge is final, and that in sending in your photos you're happy for us to use them for advertising - on the web site or, just possibly, in a brochure or similar. And - to mention prompt booking yet again - when it comes to the prize, this must be booked on a course that's not already full !)

Wildlife Luxury

Mace and I have been working to refine the items that we'll be making on the new Woodworking For Wildlife course and we've updated the photos on the web site accordingly. We are talking about luxury accommodation for birds, bees or ladybirds!

There are a few more days of course development to go yet, lots of new ideas to try out and others to polish still further, but I'm really looking forward to the first time we make these things with guests. If only animals could talk ... some feedback from the eventual end-users would be good.

Soggy

The leaves on the hornbeam "ceiling" above the woodland workshop are now fully out and the whole area has been transformed again - it now has the cathedral-like quality that I love, and the dappled light that is so great to work in. However, as if in spite of the balmy weather of the last few weeks, May's bowl carving course took place just as the weather broke and we had to work under our winter parachute-silk-ceiling instead. Very frustrating but, talking of transformations, it is great to see guests change from worried folk wondering about their sanity as they start day one in a soggy woodland to enthusiastic woodland dwellers - in just a couple of hours! There is something totally unique and quite wonderful about being outside but dry and comfortable in a rain storm.

Having said that, I confess I am looking forward to some sunny days again - I think it's the quality of the light that I enjoy above everything else that's good about summer.

Thanks for reading - and I'm looking forward to seeing your pictures.

Guy and the team

Tree Of The Month: Oak

Oak is the quintessential British woodland tree. In the post-glacial wildwood that once covered the country, oak growing with hazel covered the land from lowland Scotland to the midlands, and over most of Wales and the west country. There are two native species; the sessile oak, Quercus petraea, is commonest in the north and west, often on rocky, windswept sites. We lived for a while in the temperate rainforest zone (yes, really!) of coastal west Wales, where the rugged landscape featured many small woodlands made up of dwarfed, lichen-encrusted specimens. Quercus robur, the English oak, is the more common and widespread tree of the British countryside. Interestingly, sessile oaks will grow well from acorns under a parent tree, leading to the development of single-species woodland; English oaks will not. Mace tells me that the only native means by which an oak can spread uphill is if a jay carries the acorn out of the wood and then drops it uphill of the tree, but grey squirrels also do the job now.

So, how to tell them apart? Pick up an acorn. Q. robur, the English oak is also known as the pedunculate oak, because it carries its acorns on little stems, or peduncles. Q. petraea, the sessile oak, from the Latin sessilis, meaning stalkless, does not. Unfortunately for the purposes of identification, the two species hybridise freely, but although both may be found in woodlands, human intervention has ensured that the English oak is more widespread. For a long time acorns had a commercial value in their own right as they were used to fatten livestock; in the Domesday Book, woodland is measured by the number of pigs it could support. Because of this, and because the timber was valued for ships, buildings, charcoal and furniture, and the bark essential for tanning, Q. robur was widely planted, although Q. petraea was also managed as coppice for bark and for the production of hot-burning charcoal in the north and west.

The English Oak is a tree steeped in myth, history, and the very essence of Englishness. Celtic mythology assigns the qualities of courage, inner strength and endurance to the oak, qualities reiterated centuries later in the famous lines from an eighteenth century sea shanty - 'Heart of oak are our ships/ Heart of oak are our men'.

All parts of this powerful tree are used symbolically in their own right. The acorn is representative of immortality, power and persistence - 'Great oaks from little acorns grow'. Acorns, along with oak leaves are often seen in heraldic designs because of this symbolism. The Celtic veneration of the oak was also absorbed into the Christian tradition in other more tangible ways; carvings of oak trees, leaves, acorns, and oak-apples are found in most of the cathedrals, and many old churches, sometimes with a carving of the powerfully symbolic Green Man, wreathed in oak leaves that spring forth from his mouth.

These real and perceived qualities of longevity and power led to the oak taking a special place in the British cultural and physical landscape. Oaks were planted to mark boundaries, crossroads and meeting places; historically, charters were read, and laws passed, beneath them; Kings were crowned and marriages took place, Druids taught and made ceremonies under them. In time, some of the sacred pagan trees were Christianised as 'gospel oaks' used by the clergy to pause and preach to the congregation while Beating the Bounds - a tradition that is itself a Christianised version of early fertility rites.

Historically, there is a great tangle of oak-themed ceremonies in May, some Christian, some pagan, and some secular. Some establishments and villages with a strong royalist tradition still celebrate Oak Apple Day, a now-defunct public holiday commemorating the restoration of the monarchy. During his exile, Charles II famously hid in an oak at Boscobel; on his triumphant return to London, it was decreed that May 29th should henceforth be a public holiday 'for the dressing of trees'. This event dates from 1660, but may be related to a much earlier pagan ritual involving an oak-clad Garland King, celebrated around the same time.

A couple of lovely oak facts to leave you with: The oak supports more than 500 species of insects and invertebrates - the greatest number of any British broadleaf. It has been estimated that a mature open grown specimen may have a leaf area measuring up to seven acres - that's seven acres of solar panels!

Carolyn Brightwater

In The Woods This Month

Not a lot has been happening work-wise in the copse this month, just the dregs of extraction. Aside from work, it has all been happening in the woods ... those tentative buds that I mentioned last month are now a vigorous full-blown riot of regeneration. Thankfully, 90% of the overstood hazel stools seem to have pulled through. The majority of the ash cut towards the end of the season seems to be putting up multiple shoots as well - the omens are looking good for a crop of decent ash poles in a decade's time. All this thrusting vegetation brought to mind an English Romany saying, along the lines of "a man can only truly lay claim to as much earth as he can lie on; nature will take everything else back, as she has no need for deeds."

Traditionally, green wood crafts would have been carried out in the summer months, utilising the raw materials and adding value in the woods from which they were cut. This is one of the many examples of the inherent efficiencies of traditional green wood crafts - the woodsman and his hand tools would go straight to the source, meaning that only finished products and components need be carried from the woods and taken to market. (Incidentally, 'woodsman' is not a sexist term or assumption - 'man' from the Latin 'manus' meaning 'hand', in this context literally 'hand of the woods'; indeed turning tree to product was often a family undertaking.)

By way of contrast, the bulk of contemporary industrialised wood production and subsequent crafts follow a particularly wasteful route; massive harvesting machines cutting vast swathes of monocultural forestry, huge forwarding machines extracting the timber, transported by lorry to a sawmill, taken to a kiln, dried artificially quickly, sold either wholesale or transported even further to retail timber yards, stacked until purchased by the craftsman, transported to his (or her) workshop, machined into a finished product, transported to a retail outlet, purchased and then transported to the eventual owners home. You get the idea.

The traditional craft methods aren't called green woodwork for nothing! The 'tree to product' process that we undertake through green woodwork is a uniquely satisfying and timeless activity; a small sliver of providing for oneself from our natural environment. Therapy, indeed.

Mace Brightwater