August 2010

In this issue:

• Holiday Family Fun
• Rent The Woodland Workshop And Farm
• Woodland Parties
• For Children
• The 'Wood Wizard of Holditch'
• Marking The End Of Summer
• River Cottage Autumn Fair
• Back To Work
• Adam And Tom
• Celebrating John Makepeace
• The Charcoal Burner's Chair

As regular readers will know, this newsletter is the place where we release new dates, new courses and special offers. In between newsletters, don't forget that you can also keep up to date with what we're up to via: Facebook, Twitter and our blog.

Holiday Family Fun

With no courses scheduled for August we like to enjoy the chance to have a break from teaching and enjoy life as a family here in the West Country. With three boys this means lots of camping, surfing and skateboard parks ... and a new record this year of four visits to A&E and two broken bones at the last count. Next year we're considering renting a cottage nearer to the hospital to save on the all the mileage incurred to and from A&&E during the school holidays!

Rent The Woodland Workshop And Farm

On the subject of school holidays, we are planning to rent out the Woodland Workshop and the farm (together) for all of next August. If you have enjoyed your time here whilst attending a course and and would like to have the run of the place next year do let me know ASAP as we are anticipating quite a few enquiries. The farm has six bedrooms and is set up for family life, while the Woodland Workshop has 10 camping pitches, a woodland shower and a fully equipped woodland kitchen.

I thought hiring both simultaneously would suit a family who could have friends to come and go over the month and use the camping facilities as 'overflow' - but it is there for whatever you can dream up (within reason!).

If you would like to discuss the options just give me a call, but sooner rather than later would be safest! (As ever, our regular newsletter readers are the first to know about new course dates and offerings such as this.)

Woodland Parties

In between holidaying we have had a few interesting events here in the woods, not least last weekend's 40th birthday party. This started off being celebrated in nearby Bridport; the Woodland Workshop came into its own on the Sunday, when it was used for a very laid-back 'after party'. It was all tremendously relaxed, with all-night revellers drifting in and out all day to enjoy the Nettle Pickers' delicious curry and cakes, mellow music, wood fires and newspapers to read. Children enjoyed the day in the 'art tent' and everyone drifted back to reality in the early evening. All in all, it was the perfect antidote to the previous night spent out on the town.

For Children

August has also seen us hosting a children's birthday party in the tipi (UV lights, flouro paint included) which inevitably finished with everyone swimming in the pond, and a three-day summer camp with the fantastic and endlessly enthusiastic Sharky and George, who came down with 15 children from London by train and in their converted London cab.

Sharky and George did most of the entertaining, including making and sleeping in dens and racing in their giant hamster balls on the pond. I managed a look-in with a bit of spatula making (including the obligatory air guitar spatula session at the end), finished off with a bit of letter carving and pizza making. They all headed back to London exhausted and happy with the sort of memories that I am sure they will keep with them for many years to come.

If you are planning a children's party in or around London then their details can be found here.

The 'Wood Wizard of Holditch' ...

We don't just party when we're not running courses. No, we dress up too!

As regular readers will be aware, we also hire out the Woodland Workshop for photo shoots and TV work. As a result, we recently found ourselves in the woods with all of the characters in place to enact a fairy tale for our friends at Hi Ho Silver, to illustrate their 'catapaper' (a mixture of catalogue and newspaper), due out any moment now.

It would have been kind (but not as much fun) to have warned Bob the plumber that the cast were going to turn up in the woods when he was doing some routine work on his own in the woodland kitchen - I will never forget the look of surprise on his face as the MD of Hi Ho Silver turned up in full fairy tale costume.

I don't want to give the game away so I'll keep quiet about the story line. However, what I can say is that I didn't get off scot-free. Although I was not expecting to dress up as the 'Wood Wizard of Holditch' I found myself whittling up a quick wand and working some drawknife magic on the shaving horses ...

To see what the folks at Hi Ho Silver have been up to in the woods you can follow the story as it unravels here.

Marking The End Of Summer

To polish off the summer holidays, we will be at River Cottage this coming weekend (4th-5th September) for their 'River Cottage Autumn Fair'. I'll be demonstrating some of our courses and am looking forward to another year at this fantastic event - great food, music and above all great company.

Do come and join us if you can; full details are here.

Back To Work

After all that, we're looking forward to getting back to work with a very full schedule running from next week through to mid-December.

As regular readers will be aware, we've released some extra dates and a few of these still have some spaces, namely:

• Sept 20th - Make A Chair From A Tree
• Sept 27th - Carving A Wooden Bowl
• Nov 1st - Pole Lathe & Green Woodworking
• Nov 4th - Carving A Wooden Bowl
• Nov 10th - Coracle Making

Adam And Tom

I'm very pleased to announce that Adam Hawker - who many readers will have met helping out in the woods from time to time - will be joining us full time from next month to help with our plans for developing the camping and bodgers shelters sides of the Woodland Workshop, as well as helping me on the courses.

I'm really looking forward to having Adam around on a daily basis and it will be great to to see his already considerable skills develop further over the coming months. He will be joined for a few of our Autumn courses by Tom from the BBC Mastercrafts series, who'll be helping to teach here again after some very successful courses before the summer holidays.

Celebrating John Makepeace

John Makepeace, who many of us had the privilege of learning our craft from many years ago, is celebrating 50 years at the forefront of British Design. There is a new film to mark his work, and more details are available here.

And that's it for August, almost. Those with good memories will remember that we were very excited last month to announce a new regular feature, to start in this newsletter. To that end, I'd like to now introduce Ben Short and his 'Tales From The Charcoal Burners Chair'. The first instalment is below. Ben works with Guy Furner (whom many of you will know from our 'Make A Chestnut Garden Gate' courses). Guy and Ben run Flintbatch Working Wood and come highly recommended if you need any woodland management, charcoal, fencing or gate making done in or around West Dorset.

As always, thanks for reading.

Guy and the team

The Charcoal Burner's Chair

Part and parcel of a charcoal burner's life is regular overnighting in the woods. A normal burn takes 24 hours, and as we're required to be there throughout, there's no knocking off at 5pm. Now, I'm probably going to puncture a few romantic illusions, but the image of a noble woodman forgoing even forty winks to watch a kiln through the night is no longer true. We actually go to bed. Some of us even snore.

Our night, however, is probably about as restful as a young couple's with teething sextuplets. Every three hours, our alarm goes off and we stagger outside to rotate the kiln's three chimneys. This is because we want an even airflow throughout the kiln, guaranteeing the best possible yield at the end of the job.

The necessity of staying overnight in the woods meant wood-colliers of old would have built a simple lean-to covered in turf to live in during the burning season. At Flintbatch Working Wood, we make do with a tent, but are hoping to upgrade to a living van next year.

Which tidily brings me to today's main topic: mobile huts. Now show me a living van, or a shepherd's hut, or a gypsy open lot and I go a bit gaga. In short, I am a hut-geek. As the late Roger Deakin wrote in his wonderful book 'Wildwood - a journey through trees': "I have a weakness for sheds and huts of all kinds". He goes further: "What is it about being enclosed by wood that is so comforting? I think it is the symbolic act of leaving worldly things behind in the house and climbing aboard the uncluttered wagon, sunk deep into the leaf-purified air of an unruly Suffolk hedgerow that calms me down and encourages the dreams."

The humble shepherd's hut has had a remarkable rise in status over the years, and whilst Gabriel Oak in Far from the Madding Crowd appreciated the comfort afforded by his, the money they now fetch would have made him blanch. Indeed, I'm betting the shepherd would have been less surprised if Bathsheba Everdene had lifted up her bustle on page 5 and said to him, 'Come on then shepherd, what you got under that smock?'

My relationship with shepherds' huts started in 1978, when I came across one abandoned in a hedge. This was on the high, dry chalk of Hampshire, once a hotbed of such things. But even 30 years ago, most were long gone - either rotted away or burnt, their ironwork sold for scrap.

At one time huts were found all over the South Country (they were also used in North Norfolk and the Lincolnshire Wolds), pulled out onto the Downs to be home for the shepherd during lambing and when folding the sheep on the infertile hills, far from the farm. To me, the hut shares many of the characteristics of the shepherd himself - hardy, practical and unpretentious. These men were, and still are, my heroes. For their affinity with Nature, their animal husbandry, their tolerance of hardship, and their sheer 'ableness' - qualities which, sadly, seem so remote in many of us today.

So it is with no little passion that I want to commemorate these huts - and, in turn, honour those who sheltered in them. And here's the rub. When I click on eBay these days and see the chicken huts and renovated Wendy houses masquerading as 'shepherds' huts', I feel vaguely homicidal. I've even seen a burger van which had undergone deliberate rustication described as a 'shepherd's living wagon'. The only possible relation this carbuncle had with shepherding is that it might once have served lamb kebabs.

Then you've got those huts which have tragically undergone the 'middle-class makeover'. What many people do in the name of restoration is tantamount to vandalism. Electric, posh paint and Roman blinds? Why not put double glazing in at the same time? I've honestly considered founding a shepherd's hut preservation society to try and rescue those poor blighters.

My own hut, bought many moons ago off a shepherdess in Higher Ansty, Dorset, was made in Shaftesbury at the tail end of the 19th Century. Inside, its venerable wooden walls are covered in branding-iron marks and one can read the inscription - 'W. Gilbert 1912' - scored into the tongue &groove. Selling it, the shepherdess was less interested in getting a good price and more concerned that it stayed as it was. I assured her it would.

So, if you know of any huts that are in danger of a dab of Farrow & Ball or just plain neglected, please call me on the shepherd's hut hotline. If I don't answer, I'm probably asleep by the kiln.

Ben Short
FLINTBATCH WORKING WOOD
gate-making · fencing · charcoal · woodland management