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. 

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.

Middle Ground

I’ve just produced a 16 page hand-stitched pamphlet. It involved lots of faffing about with the pages so that I could fold a great big A1 sheet and stitch it in the old-fashioned way. The text is a piece of writing, which I called Middle Ground, because that’s what it’s about, the bits in the middle. The middle of Scotland, walking to Lawers by Loch Tay, crossing the middle altitudes between the coast and the mountain tops, and the sort of ground that covers most of Scotland where people used to live but now there are just sheep and deer. It’s illustrated with lino-cuts, mostly done for an exhibition at the Birnam Exhibition in November and December this year. I’ve also got some prints for sale at Open Studio event in Perthshire, at Bonnie Maggio’s glass studio.