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

I had almost forgotten the pleasure of being in the woodland workshop on a crisp frosty morning. The fires are blazing again and, as the evenings close in it will be a case of flares and head torches at the ready for the two November courses ...

A Truly Personal Gift

By the way, at the time of writing both the November courses (Bowl Carving and Kitchen & Garden Pole Lathe Turning) have two or three places available - so if you're up for a late booking, now's your chance. As regular course-goers will know, we don't run courses in December (everyone's too busy with Christmas) so these are your last opportunities to make a truly personal, one-off Christmas gift.

Building A Willow Trug

I'm delighted to announce that 2008 will see the launch of the much-requested trug-making course. A woven willow trug certainly involves a new set of skills for me, so for this one I'll be assisting Malcolm Seal. Regular newsletter readers will know Malcolm from previous editions - he's a local basket weaver of exceptional talent and extensive teaching experience.

Malcolm has designed this trug-making course specifically for us, in response to a number of requests from previous guests. There are more details in the 'Course Details' section.

Going on the number of requests there have been for this project, I suspect it might be wise to book your place soon. There are three dates to pick from - book online in the normal way.

December Open Day

If you can call in on December 2nd (a Sunday), then we'll be pleased to see you - we're holding an open day down in the workshop from 10.00am - 4.00pm. We'll be demonstrating many of the techniques we teach on courses, and there'll be some (smaller) items for sale too - which we hope will make good presents. Everyone's welcome, so whether you're an old friend or a guest-to-be who's curious to find out what it's all about, feel free to call in. There's no need to book - just turn up on the day, dressed for a five minute walk through the meadow to the workshop.

For directions to Mangerton House, please click here (pdf format).

Pole Lathe Turners Turning Up

Talking of turning up, I'm delighted to be hosting the Association of Pole Lathe Turners Autumn meeting here at Mangerton house. Any members or friends of members are welcome to come along and chat about the finer points of the craft, swap ideas and share knowledge. I must say I'm very much looking forward to putting a face to some well established names, but it must be said this gathering is for 'hard core' Pole Lathers only!

Nurse! The Screens

(If I could write that in a Kenneth Williams accent, I would.)

I have spent every Monday of the last four weeks inside an air-conditioned classroom. That is something that I normally go to very great lengths to avoid but it was a necessary evil, and means I now have my first aid qualifications. (Mace and I are now both fully qualified to deal with any accidents.) Obviously, I hope my newly acquired knowledge will never be needed and we'll continue to put the emphasis on avoiding accidents rather than dealing with them - each course always includes safety demonstrations and fail-safe tool use instructions. However, better safe than sorry.

And there goes another month. I just going down to the workshop to make sure there are plenty of logs for the coming courses, and then I'm off to help Mace and Malcolm press this year's apple crop in the local Cider hut.

Hoping to see you down here soon.

Guy and the team

Tree Of The Month: Apple

This month, as members of our local cider-making group, we have been out collecting apples from the local orchards, 'the Englishman's proper and natural vineyard', gathering windfalls from beneath old, leaning, lichen-covered trees. The harvest is taken in sacks and baskets to the cider-shed, where they are crushed and pressed using ancient and unsanitary-looking machinery to release wonderful autumn aromas, and the promise of cider in the spring. Cider was once the essential drink of country people, in preference to beer, which required time, skill and expensive ingredients. It was most popular where the grape vine would not grow well, but apple trees would - particularly in southern England, northern France and the Basque country.

All the varieties of apple that we enjoy for eating, cooking and drinking are descended from the wild crab apple Malus sylvestris, a tree of old woodlands and hedgerows, and now quite rare. Most of the wild apple trees we see are 'wildings' that will have grown from a discarded apple core of a variety of Malus domestica, the cultivated apple of which over 6,000 varieties have been known, although many of these have been lost. Wildings may bear fruit something like the apple they came from, or similar to the wild crab, or something entirely different. As such, they are a valuable gene pool that may give rise to a delicious new apple.

Most named apple varieties will have arisen through deliberate selection and hybridisation, but the first domesticated apples were natural mutations of Malus sylvestris brought into cultivation for their superior size and taste. Apples must cross-pollinate to produce fruit, and so do not come true from seed. The only way to propagate more of a good and useful variety is through the use of grafting techniques, whereby a branch or bud is taken from the tree to be propagated and inserted into a slit made in another young tree - the rootstock, the growth habit of which dictates the ultimate size of the apple tree. Although many of the known varieties of apple were raised by horticulturalists, there is still room in the world of apples for the lucky seedling grown from a pip, or springing up as a wilding, like the earliest identified domestic apples. Many of our most loved varieties started life in a back garden; Cox's orange pippin was the fruit of an amateur grower, and Bramley's seedling, the most popular cooking apple, began life as a pip planted by a child in her back garden, as so many of us have done.

Fruit cultivation has been traced back over 5,000 years in Turkey and Northern Iran. Probably bought to Britain by the Romans, it was taken up by the monasteries, who developed cultivation techniques through links with religious orders in Europe; there is a picture dating from 1165 showing an apple tree in a monastery garden. From early times apples were a valued crop, particularly when they were the only fruit available over the winter. As well as a food, apples have long been used medicinally; cooked apples were thought beneficial for a range of ailments from sore throats to rheumatism, and were also thought to aid the digestion, hence apple sauce is traditional with fatty pork and goose; crab apple juice or 'verjuice' was taken to treat diarrhoea, and rubbed on to treat sprains and bruises. As apples are actually rich in vitamins and minerals, they can aid detoxification, have a proven beneficial effect on the digestion, and can be beneficial in cases of gout, arthritis, skin problems and headaches. The origin of the phrase 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away' is clear.

As befits a tree cultivated and valued over the centuries in many cultures, there is a wealth of folklore surrounding the apple. In Celtic lore it was associated with the time of harvest and abundance, and was thought to represent the fertile Earth Mother; when cut open, it displays a five pointed star, an ancient symbol of protection. In diverse cultures magical apples offered a route to immortality - for the Norsemen, the apples of perpetual youth grew at Asgard, home of the gods. For the Greeks, it was the golden apples of the Hesperides; in English mythology Avalon was the magical land of apples where King Arthur was taken to heal his mortal wounds after his final battle against the army of Mordred at Camlann. In this paradise, the apple tree bore fruit and flowers together; in another paradise, the Garden of Eden, the apple was the fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Hopefully, fruit cultivation is again ascendant in Britain after the dreadful post war years when so many orchards were lost - over 150,000 acres since the 1950's. Then, grants were paid to grub up the trees in the name of agricultural modernisation; now, grants are available to replant orchards, although sadly these are mostly monocultural commercial orchards without the historical and habitat value of the old ones. Luckily, there is also the will to conserve old orchards and to propagate rare old varieties. Apple Days, to eat, celebrate and identify apples, are being held this month here in Dorset and nationwide. Apple Days are important for the identification of old varieties thought to be lost, or even brand new cultivars; take a look on the website of orchard champions Common Ground (www.commonground.org.uk) to find one local to you and go along to see, taste, and identify that apple from your own garden.

Carolyn Brightwater

In The Woods This Month

This month, as Mace prepares to start a new season of hedge laying and coppicing, I have been the one in the woods, honing my meagre axe and saw skills on 'trees up to a diameter of 8 inches', courtesy of the BTCV. The trees that I have been felling for the past few days have been stems from old hazel coppice stools, and young alders that had spread too far from the stream side to crowd the path. Trees up to a diameter of 8 inches are not that impressive. They are the foot soldiers of the woodland, and, out walking in the woods, you would scarcely register them as trees at all, with their bare trunks crowded together, and their slight canopies battling for the light high overhead. Felling, however, gives a different perspective.

Once I had made the v-shaped cut - the 'bird's mouth', we were taught; 'the gob', says Mace - on the face of the (intended) direction of fall, I was committed to finishing the process with the felling cut. This involved crouching at the base of what suddenly seemed like quite a big tree, and sawing through the trunk, while listening and feeling for the moment when the tree was ready to fall.

The idea is to cut, aiming for a combination of speed and accuracy, so as to leave a hinge of wood, to control the speed and direction of fall. Watching the tutor do it was not at all the same as my experience of squeezing the bowsaw between crowded trunks to put in the felling cut, and the truly scary moment when the tree is balanced almost at tipping point, and still you must saw away towards the hinge, not moving back into the reassuringly-named 'escape zone' until the tree is definitely falling over.

It was an exhilarating few days, made hugely more enjoyable by the perfect autumn weather; I learned a lot, including huge respect for the trees, the tools, and the people who use them on a daily basis to earn a living, and I will be using my axe a lot more often!

Carolyn Brightwater