Peace and Flowers

I’m just back from a couple of surprisingly hot and predictably midgy days on the west coast. I went with my forester friend Julie Gardiner and we stayed at Peaton Glen woods. Julie was there to help put a plan together for the owners of the wood. It used to belong to the Ministry of Defence and it neighbours the military base at Coulport, near Helensburgh but the MOD sold it off. I guess they didn’t know who they were selling to but it was bought by a peace campaigner and the wood has been used as a base for the Trident Ploughshares and others protesting at the nuclear base at Faslane and its associated bases, like Coulport. The wood is now held by a trust and they want a plan for looking after it. It wasn’t the most exciting woodland in the world, though it had some good signs, converted from the MoD keep out sort of thing to peace and welcome. It has been worked by the peace campaigners and it did look like they were improving it, slowly thinning out some of the skinny conifers and using the timber for building, fencing and fuel.
We did find some whorled caraway in a bit of meadow. I don’t think I’ve seen ity before. At first glance it looks like pignut, a very common thing in grasslands in Scotland, but pignut is long past flowering now so I looked again and noticed the tiny leaves whorling around the stem. Whorled caraway doesn’t occur in my bit of Highland Scotland so it was a good find, a tick even if I did such a thing. It was also good to see a bit of coast, being inland bound most of the time. The beaches were fringed with a froth of white bladder campion and yellow sea radish, where they weren’t swamped with Japanese knotweed. The flowers were a good relief from the MoD police who obviously thought they had to keep themselves occupied checking up on suspicious looking botanists and kept stopping to take our names, or just to stop. I guess they have to do something, though there was nothing going on that would interest them, unless they like flowers?

Nine Maidens Market and a Healing Well

I walked back to Aberfeldy from Kenmore on Monday 18th July, Nine Virgins Day. The Virgins were daughters of St Donald who all retired to the monastery at Abernethy when their father died, sometime in the eighth century. I don’t know why they were celebrated in the upper Tay valley but a market was held in their name around 18th July until at least the seventeenth century. It was last held in Kenmore but it was moved there from the field at Inchadney a mile or so down the Tay. There’s no sign of Inchadney now, either on the map or on the ground, though it was one of the most important places in the district. There was a ford across the river and a church as well as the market. The church and burial ground have disappeared under trees planted below the Star Battery, a peculiar concrete folly associated with Taymouth Castle, just across the river.

I discovered Inchadney after a friend told me about a well at the base of the scarp that skirts the edge of the Bulls Field, where Nine Virgins Market was held before it was moved to Kenmore. I found the well in wet carr marked by yellow flag and a fallen tree sprouting again in all that damp. It was a perfect little pool, cold and clear and protected by a mossy wall topped with white quartz. According to In Famed Breadalbane, our local history bible, the well was holy and much visited at Beltane, May 1st. It was easy to believe in its special powers when I drank the water. It was perfectly clear and very cold, even on a warm muggy day, with no trace of that slight muddiness of water after rain, even after the downpours we’ve had over these last few days, and weeks.

Wood engraving is used to make blocks for printing illustrations on paper so once the engraving is done it’s time to print. I’m a member of the Splinter Group and we meet about once a month to chat, eat cake and engrave. We’ve been working on a project together, a Scottish Animal Alphabet, which we’re going to exhibit at Fortingall Art at the beginning of next month. We exhibited wood engravings last year and it went down well so we were inspired to bigger things. An alphabet was quite an undertaking, 26 letters and the Scottish fauna weren’t always easy to match up. Even I was a challenge. But we’ve got there, more or less, though we haven’t got N yet. It was completed by the engraver minutes before she went into labour with her son. Baby George arrived very quickly and very well, though we’re still waiting for the block, perhaps it’s stuck in the post.

We’ve spent four days printing so far and it’s nearly done. We’ve been particularly ambitious because, as well as separate prints, we’re putting them all together into a (very) limited edition book. It includes prints by Linda Farquharson, Alyson MacNeil, Philippa Swann, Ruth Atkinson, Becky Coope, Penny Kennedy, Callum Strong, Malcolm Appleby and Anna Orr. It is entirely handmade, printed on an old Colombia press, with its eagle counterweight (there's a press like it in the new Museum of Scotland), and each one with a unique, hand printed cover.

The book and prints will be for sale in the very pretty Molteno Hall, in the even prettier village of Fortingall, Glen Lyon, Perthshire from 30th July to 7th August.

Hand engraving

I’ve been working for Malcolm Appleby, an engraver, designer, silversmith, jeweller, gardener, chicken keeper, hobbit-house creator, natural historian, performer, storyteller, etc. etc. Malcolm has been engraving, designing, making for over 45 years and has generated huge volume of work and all the associated stuff that goes with it, drawings, prints, photos, press cuttings, invoices, correspondence. He’s kept a lot and it’s been my job to go through it and archive and catalogue it. It’s been a fascinating process and I’ve learned an enormous amount about how to live a successful life and run a business as a craftsman/artist.

He hosted a meeting to celebrate hand engraving last weekend, from 30th June to 2nd July, 2011. The workshop was alive with chat and hammering metal that spilled out into the sunshine in the garden and quieter refuges in the house. It was great to see such a varied group of craftspeople working within such a small and specialist world. Some, like Wally Gilbert, have been silversmithing for years, others like Aileen Tan, are early in their careers. Aileen gave us a demonstration of her kinetic jewellery, with tiny square ended bolts swinging and twirling on their tracks, completely hypnotic and exquisitely well made. I learned about different techniques: there were chasers like Wally and Miriam Hanid who shape metal into organic forms, Ndidi Ekubia hammers vigour into her pieces and Jane Short enlivens her work with the colour of enamels. But this weekend was about engraving, another technique they could all use to enhance their work.

Engraving is simply making a mark into a surface by cutting, scratching, scoring, chiselling. It’s not that different from drawing or doodling. I’ve been engraving into wood for quite a while (since the last engraver’s meeting at Aultbeag a couple of years ago) but have recently started engraving in metal, silver and copper, and have been intrigued by the differences. Firstly, there’s the materials: tools bite more into metal so the tools don’t skite off as easily as they do with wood. Then there’s the finished object: wood engraving is used for illustration so the engraved wood is not the finished object it’s a block to take a print from and the engraved lines will not print, it’s the uncut surfaces that take the ink, a simple fact that took me a long time to get my head around. And of course the printed image will be a mirror of the engraved surface, a crucial point for some designs. On silver the surface you’re engraving is an embellishment on the finished object and there’s no need to worry about leaving uncut space for inking up. Engraving on metal can be purely decorative, a way of emphasising form, or a narrative device, used to tell a story connected to the object or the engraver or the commissioner. Malcolm is a great one for storytelling and many of his pieces illustrate some sort of narrative, but engravers, like all craftspeople/artists are a varied lot and not everyone tells a story. It was striking to me how many of the engravers at the meeting were pattern makers and the wood engraving session on Saturday really demonstrated that.