String

I’ve been inspired by how the Crannog people on Loch Tay lived what seemed like quite a decent life 2,500 years ago, even in what was often a tough and isolated place, relatively poor in materials like metals or clay.  They were farmers so they had domestic animals and grain crops for food and they did have some iron tools that were probably made elsewhere but they had to build their houses and make most of their domestic and farming utensils and tools themselves with what they could find locally, mostly from plants.  One of the most basic things they needed was string and rope.  The Crannog roof is lashed together with miles of twine and it must have been a big job to make enough, though I’m sure they did it themselves, there was no B & Q to buy it from then.  And I was reading Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s wonderful book ‘Women’s Work: the first 20,000 years’ about the development of textiles in prehistoric societies and the role played by women who made them. She pointed out the importance of string, even saying there was a ‘string revolution’ when people discovered how to make strong, long twine out of plants (and I guess animal sinew too).  All you need are longish fibres, like those in leaves of grass leaves, in two or more bundles, that are twisted in opposite directions and then twisted together.  That’s it.  So I’ve been making grass string, and string from nettles and willow and lime bast.  It’s easy and addictive. I made a metre or so of grass string when I was walking the dog and I even managed to make a grass string bag. It took quite a while and probably isn’t the strongest but it shows what you can do with almost nothing but plants.  Just like people who lived on the Crannog. 

The River on Show

Fortingall Art is on the go this week, with our Splinter Group River project all hung in its little alcove in the Molteno Hall.   It’s probably our most ambitious and diverse show there to date.  The River theme has proved a real inspiration. It brought out all our individual styles and allowed us to broaden out our printmaking too.  Alyson MacNeill has done a series of beautifully detailed and -lively multi-coloured lino prints inspired by the rivers Tay and Dee and the birds, people and trees that live along them.  Philippa Swann has been playing with monoprints and reflections in moving water to make exquisite wood engravings that show her love of pattern and texture.   Becky Coope has produced a series of precisely cut and elegant wood engravings of the buildings and landmarks around the mouth of the Tay at Dundee and Brought Ferry and Penny Kennedy played with patterns formed by her dumpy little dippers amongst round river pebbles and joyful jumping fish.  And Linda Farquharson showed her naked lady lying in the landscape and smothered in flowers.  What next?

The River

July and Fortingall Art is coming around again. This annual exhibition, which is held in the Molteno Hall in the picture-on-a-chocolate-box village of Fortingall in Highland Perthshire, is becoming an annual spur to us in the Splinter Group to come up with a themed exhibit of our wood engravings. After last year’s calendar, when the six of us engraved a couple of months each on four inch square blocks, we decided we wanted to do something a bit looser and with a bit more scope for individual style. So we came up with ‘The River’ as our theme. There’s plenty of inspiration from the river Tay and its tributaries, even when it’s running so low as it is just now with all this hot, dry weather. As usual we all feel that we would like more time, but that’s the way things are, hopefully it means it’s a work in progress.

My main piece is a combination of lino and wood engraving to illustrate a poem I wrote ‘Salmon Leaping at the Hermitage’. It feels quite liberating to mix media by using it to complement my words and to expand my image making on wood by using lino, which is a scale I’m more comfortable with. I’ve also been experimenting with mono printing to get some watery backgrounds for my wood engraved fish.

The exhibition runs from Saturday 27th July to Sunday 4th August and has a snazzy new website www.fortingallart.co.uk.

How to make a bag with a knife

Since I’ve been at the Scottish Crannog Centre I’ve been doing some dabbling in Iron Age technology. Not just Iron Age technology, some of it is Stone Age especially making holes in stones.  Oakbank Crannog, the underwater original, has produced quite a few stones with holes.   It’s not clear what they were all used for but some of them were spindle whorls, the weight at the bottom of a drop spindle.  Inspired by their simplicity I made myself a drop spindle by making a hole in a likely looking stone, i.e. one that’s looked fairly soft, with a piece of quartz, then whittling a shaft out of a bit of firewood.  Then I spun some yarn out of wool from Soay sheep that belong to one of my fellow Crannogistas.  It took me a while. I’d not done any spinning before and I was trying to make a fairly thick yarn since that’s what I’m used to knitting or crocheting with.  They didn’t knit in the Iron Age, or at least I don’t think they did 2500 years ago on Loch Tay, and I don’t think they crocheted either.  They did weave, but I don’t, and I don’t have a loom so I decided to make something with crochet.   I didn’t have a crochet hook with me so I whittled that too out of another bit of firewood and used it to make a little drawstring pouch.  It’s not the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made but it was deeply satisfying to make a finished object out of stuff that I found locally and mostly gets treated as rubbish, burnt or ignored.  The only thing I used that I didn’t make or find was the knife to whittle the spindle and crochet hook.  Just like the Iron Age.  There was a little iron knife found at Oakbank Crannog.  It’s not easy to work iron so it probably came from somewhere else. It would have been a special thing, but damned useful to make something out of not much.

A forage in the Iron Age

I’m at the Scottish Crannog Centre this season, guiding and demonstrating Iron Age crafts, and it’s been a great learning experience about how people lived in the Highlands 2500 years ago. The Crannog is a reconstruction of an underwater structure in Loch Tay that has been excavated over the last thirty years or so. It dates from about 500 BC, so it’s prehistoric but the preservation of stuff in the cold waters of Loch Tay has been so perfect that it’s been possible to find hazel wattle walls, wood floors, supporting piles made from alder, turf from the roof and all the accumulated rubbish that fell through the floor, especially bracken, which was used on the roof and the floor and as cavity wall insulation, bits of chaff from wheat, barley and other crops, seeds from wild fruits like blackberry, raspberry and cloudberry and even sheep droppings from animals kept in the house over the water. It was a home that was made entirely of plants by people who knew their local environment intimately.

There was a food festival at the Crannog on Sunday, with food cooked by methods and with ingredients available in the Iron Age. We did a bit of foraging to gather spring greens from the wild, which I think must have been particularly valued at this time of year as a kind of spring tonic, full of flavour and freshness, after a winter of grains and dried meat. It was a bit of a challenge to find much this year after such a slow, cold spring but the ransoms are here in abundance, very garlicky after hanging around for such a long time before the slightly warmer weather got them growing, though most of them still aren’t in flower yet. We’ve had a some fine days, which have brought on a few more things recently and we did manage to find some early hedge garlic, lady’s smock (very fiery but good flavour, if you like hot mustard), hairy bittercress, which tastes like watercress, nettles, coltsfoot, rosebay (it has a strong flavour, I suspect it needs cooking), opposite-leaved golden saxifrage, which looks pretty in a salad but doesn’t taste of much, gosegrass (my dog’s favourite green nibble) and lots of ransoms.

Looking at flies

I’ve been thinking about my blog title, taking a closer look, and why I’m writing it.  On a practical level it’s helped me take more note of what I’m doing.  By writing about it and recording it in a semi-public way I’ve made myself a record, which is becoming useful for the projects I’ve been writing about. 

And taking a close look at the natural world is something that is always worthwhile, which takes me to my nasty fly photo.  I took this picture in the summer, having found these dead flies and thinking there was something odd about them but not sure what.   Then I bought Peter Marren’s new book, Mushrooms, published by the wonderful British Wildlife Publishing (who take looking at the natural world as seriously as it deserves).  Flicking through and looking at the photos I found one like mine of a dead fly.  The text told me it was infected by a fungus, Entomophora muscae¸ which invades the fly’s system and affects its behaviour so its dying act is to climb to the top of long grass, where the fungus bursts out of the fly and throws its spores into the wind so it can infect some other unlucky insect.  Not a pretty way to live, but effective and, to my mind anyway, wonderful.  But to discover wonders like fly killing fungus you need to look.  I can’t congratulate myself on knowing what it was when I first saw it, but I can credit myself for seeing it and recognising it as something out of the ordinary.  That’s what looking is all about.

Ash

I was in Treswell yesterday, on a golden autumn day with the Notts Wildlife Trust volunteers, who were coppicing hazel. I left them at it and went for a walk around the wood and had a good look at the trees.  Treswell is typical in many ways of woods in this part of England because it is dominated by ash.  When NWT bought it forty years ago it wasn’t so long since the war and the mass felling that had gone on then to support the war effort.  A huge number of woods were clear-felled, including Treswell, and left to do their own thing in the years afterwards.  Traditional woodland management was dead then, certainly in Nottinghamshire, and it wasn’t going to revive at all until the 1990s, and even then only in a few lucky woods like Treswell.  So all those abandoned woods, that were probably fairly diverse with oak, field maple and other broadleaves, as well as ash, became almost entirely ash because ash can set lots of seed and establish very quickly on disturbed sites and nothing was done to thin them out.  If you wanted to set the scene for a disaster to attack those woodlands then you couldn’t do much better than that.  All that was needed to finish it off was a disease that kills ash.  And what do we have to do the job?  Chalara fraxinea.  It could have been avoided, or come slow enough to allow time to get those devastated woods back into good heart, if we didn’t have this insane system of transporting live plants around the globe and if we really valued and understood our natural resources.  But cash is king, if we knew then we ignored and Chalara is here to do what it will do. 

But Treswell Wood is in good heart, thanks largely to the revival of coppice management over the last twenty years.  Thanks also to good luck.  It belongs to the Wildlife Trust who have allowed it to be managed sensitively using old, tested ways, it’s fairly big and there are other trees than ash here.  In fact it has a very diverse range of trees and shrubs including oak, elm (they didn’t all die in that other much-cited tree disaster), field maple, wild cherry, apple, dogwood, midland hawthorn and lots and lots of hazel.  It’s probably the hazel that has rescued Treswell.  It’s a valuable and entirely renewable resource.  And many of those masses of ash trees have been thinned out over the years for firewood and timber.  Now there’s space and light for all those other species to flourish and keep the wood alive, whatever our mad society throws at it.  I hope.

I’m writing more about this in my forthcoming book, Treswell, a working wood.  I’m not sure when it’ll come out but ash dieback is concentrating my mind.