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

Yes, it's a cliché - but it's true! In response to popular demand, we've added a new bowl carving course to the diary - on the 27th-28th September. (The earlier September one has already sold-out.) So, if September's good for you and bowl carving's your thing ... book now!

New Dates For 2008

Earlier than previously, we have now released next year's course dates. We have done this for two reasons:

firstly, we're coming to realise that a lot of guests need to book time off work well in advance;
secondly, our gift certificates - including the newly launched 'instant gifts' - are proving very popular and the feedback from both gift-givers and recipients is that they often need a longer 'window' in which to plan coming down here, more than the six months in advance we've offered previously.

As always, while there might be a lot to pick from right now, if you have an eye on any date do, please, book up soon to avoid disappointment.

Also, please do remember that over and above these dates we can organise courses for groups of friends, clubs or companies who want to arrange something specific / at a specific time. Just give me a call to talk over what's needed.

Our First Foot Stools

It is one thing to design and make something; quite another to design a course to make the same thing. A course has to be relaxing and achievable as well as useful, and everyone has to end up with a product that they can be proud of, regardless of their level of experience or expertise. What's more, it is quite another thing again to actually run the course for real! However, say it myself, our first footstool course last week was great fun for all concerned - including Mace and myself.

In preparation, we honed the prototype design and adapted the shaving horses for a variety of new functions, and we tested the stool joints to beyond what's reasonable (or perhaps sane).

These joints rely on one component (rails and rungs) being dry and the legs being still wet - the resultant joint is locked by the shrinkage. It is very satisfying to produce a strong structure that has no glue or screws and simply uses the natural characteristics of green wood to hold it all together. (This is how traditional Windsor chairs were made and the old Bodgers could certainly teach us a thing or two.)

Just to be sure, we have made a hook on one of the Hornbeams in the woods and anyone making a stool can have the pleasure of hanging their newly made frames from this hook and then letting it take their full body-weight! It takes a bit of nerve the first time but it is a great result.

Keeping Warm With Willow

Despite the weather we have, as usual, been enjoying ourselves in the shelter of the woodland workshop and doing a bit of preparation for next winter.

Regular readers may recall me saying about the success of our log walls as a windbreak from the south-westerly winds that whistle up the valley sometimes; indeed, you may have done a course and found out first hand. That's all very well, but then I realised my rather obvious oversight: the less common but much colder north-easterly wind is the one that we really need effective shelter from on a chilly winter's day.

Since this revelation I have been looking for a solution and now, I have to confess more the result of a bit of luck than anything else, we now have the answer: willow.

Malcolm Seal is a very respected willow worker (among many other talents) and has his own willow beds just five miles from here. He'd become understandably distracted due to his work as the River Cottage Head Gardener and so last winter's harvested willow was unused and the beds in need of tidying up. (For 'tidying up' read 'massive strimming session'. ) So far, so lucky. Even more fortunate, I had two God Children staying on a week's work experience ... which is how we ended up with four us (myself, God Children and Malcolm) wielding strimmers, forest axes and bill hooks for a day in a willow bed. That was followed up by Malcolm kindly demonstrating and teaching us how to convert the resulting pile of willow sticks into a handsome, sculptural and effective willow wall - and that's how the woodland workshop has come to have woven willow walls on the north-east side.

I owe a huge 'thank you' to Malcolm, Jack and Nick for all of their help and hard work, and I am sure I will be even more grateful when it gets cold again.

Willow Working

Malcolm runs his own courses in basket making just five minutes from us and anybody who is interested can contact him at via his web site -

http://www.malcolmseal.co.uk/

His October and November course dates could work very well back-to-back with one of our courses or with one partner doing one and another the other.

Please do mention us if you contact Malcolm, and be sure to ask about his fire-making with bow and drill expertise - something Malcolm and I were recently taught by Ross Bowyer of Bushcraft Expeditions, in nearby Hooke Woods.

That's it for me for now - I'm off to the woods to chop wood to keep our summer guests warm. Who would have believed it.

Thanks for reading.

Guy and the team

Tree Of The Month: Beech

The stately beech, Fagus sylvatica, is the most common woodland tree in the south of Britain. Typical beech woodland forms cool, cathedral-like spaces, with the smooth, graceful trunks rising from a forest floor where little else grows due to the dense shade of the beech canopy. Although there is the widely held belief that the beech was introduced to Britain by the Romans, samples of pollen found in Hampshire confirm the tree as present in England from around 6000BC. In comparison to the returning oaks they were late arrivals in post-glacial Britain, but having colonised the south of the country some 500 years before the land bridge to Europe disappeared beneath the English Channel, the beech qualifies as a native English tree.

Despite this long history in Britain as a native in the south of the country and a widely-planted introduction in the north, Fagus sylvatica is mysteriously under-represented in folk history, possibly due to the historic uses and characteristics of the tree. Beech trees are short-lived for their size, seldom reaching more than 150 years old, although some woodland pollards are considerably more ancient. The comparatively short lifespan may mean that beech trees did not register as a landscape feature as did other more long-lived species; also, the trees are historically more closely associated with woodland rather than single landscape trees, hence the Latin descriptive sylvatica. Once the trees began to be cultivated for timber and for amenity, they were planted in plantations and in parkland. Away from the woodland, however, they became more vulnerable to the weather; for a large tree, beech is surprisingly shallow rooted, and is prone to being ripped from the ground, root-plate and all, in strong winds. Many large beeches were lost to gales in recent times, and the domino effect where beeches were grown in a plantation, was often catastrophic.

From early times, beech would have been pollarded for firewood for the home and for industry. Roman ironworks and the early glass industry in the Weald depended on the wood as a major source of fuel. The beech nut, or mast was also valuable as a nutritious food for livestock, although supply was unreliable; like many trees, beech tends to produce either few fruits in a year, or a very great number - known as 'mast years'. Although the wood is strong, and usefully remains sound when submerged, it has tended to be used for utilitarian purposes - boat-keels, floodgates, furniture, tool handles and bowls. Beech was universal, widely used by green wood workers whenever a 'bit of wood' was needed. These pole-lathe turners worked outdoors, just as Guy and Mace do now, setting up their workshop in the piece of woodland they had contracted to work. At a time when pole lathes were still widely used to produce all manner of household and agricultural items, the greatest concentration of turners were in the beech-woods of the Chilterns, turning chair legs for the Windsor chair industry. Using identical methods to those taught on Guy's courses, each leg was produced from a piece of cleft timber cut to size, tapered with a draw-knife, then turned on a pole lathe. Bowl-turners also used beech, but Mace tells me that for this usage particularly, the source of the wood was important, as beech grown on a slope, called 'lazy' or 'sleepy' beech would develop a twist to the grain which would cause splitting once the bowl was turned. From experience this sounds likely, and I love the terminology!

To end on a learned note, there is an association of the name 'beech' with the word 'book', deriving from a common root in the Anglo-Saxon boc. Writings on thin slices of beech, or boc wood or bark may have been the first books, entirely appropriate for a tree so strongly associated with the written word; on many a mature beech tree graffiti may be found etched into the thin bark, a tradition that dates back at least as far as the Romans, whose proverb Crescunt illae; crescant amores translates 'as these letters grow, so may our love'. Some ancient pollards carry carved initials, dates, even verses from Victorian times or earlier.

Carolyn Brightwater

In The Woods This Month

Well, it's been a busy old year, so far.

Aside from all the woodland work on the Crutchley estate, that Phil, the horses and I undertook (see previous newsletters for the low-down on our muddy adventures), hedge laying and a variety of other woodland management work, there has been the ongoing development work down at Guy's woodland workshop. While I sometimes have to remind myself that being in a beautiful environment doing something that I deeply enjoy is in fact 'work', the behind the scenes course development is a continual process of skill sharing, review and methodical analysis. By the time any given course takes place countless hours of refinement and thought have been put into every part of the process, and we've often had to make the tools to do the job too!

Needless to say then, that as I write I'm enthusiastically looking forward to getting up to Matt Best's sawmill, where I have a large pile of ash awaiting conversion into yurt components. For those of you who have somehow managed to avoid any contact with yurts yet, I'm talking about those circular tents with a wooden trellis framework that are the preferred home of nomadic Mongolian herdsmen and discerning back-to-the-land types alike!

Stereotypes aside, they are truly fantastic structures. With their ancestry set in the pre-historic tradition of the Scythian nomads of southern Siberia, the 'Ger' (the Mongolian word for 'home') or Yurt would have been developed from a tipi- like structure. The result, in short, is a squat but robust tent whereby the walls are made of a circular wooden trellis which in turn supports numerous roof ribs. The roof ribs are centred radially around a central wooden hoop - the crown or tono. Mechanically speaking they are fantastic; the roof bears downward and outward pressure on the walls which are kept in check by a tension band around the circumference. The dynamic tension thus created means that the structure is both self supporting and robust, but better than that, the dome-like shape of the yurt causes wind passing over it creating downward pressure; i.e. the stronger/faster the wind the more stable the structure becomes. Brilliant. Once equipped with a suitable canvas or felt cover and a small wood-burning stove you have a dwelling that is cosy and warm in winter, cool in summer, attractive, portable and ultimately the most refined low impact and human-scale means of providing actual real life homes from woodland. I'm going to be busy at the sawmill, that's for sure.

And on top of all that activity, apparently it is 'Summer' - I can tell because it says so in my waterlogged diary - which means getting out and about on the county and craft show circuit, demonstrating and promoting to the good people of this fair isle what a fantastic thing green woodwork truly is. If you happen to see me out and about and you're a newsletter reader do say hello, I'm the speccy bloke thrashing away and talking constantly behind the nine ft. bungee powered pole lathe . . . I might even have my yurt with me.

Mace Brightwater

PS: For pictures of our first yurt check out www.brightwater.org.uk. If you are interested in finding out more about yurts, Paul King's book 'The Complete Yurt Handbook', Eco-logic Books, £12.99, which includes full DIY instructions, is a good place to start. Mace ;-)