This weekend I’ll be demonstrating making wooden rakes at Beamish museum’s Show of Agriculture which recreates an agricultural show from 1913. I’ve been measured for a period costume and working through my tools, sorting out which will be suitable for the show.
Thankfully, I”m a hand tool worker and often use old tool because the skills I employ were most common in the pastand they’re very often better quality than modern tools. This means my tool box consists of an axe, drawknife, spokeshaves, brace and bits, knives and proper saws with teeth you can sharpen. To add to those I’ve sharpened and fettled up a wooden smoothing plane which is a pleasure to use, made a simple measuring stick for the rakes instead of my normal tape measure and built a bucksaw to cut the logs to length.
People often ask why I use these old-fashioned tools nowadays but for me, combined with fresh greenwood, they are the most efficient and pleasurable way of working. They are versatile and ergonomic, will work anywhere (they’re the ultimate cordless tools) and even survived a workshop fire last year. I’ve already had years of use from them and the names stamped into them show that they’ve already done service for one or more craftsmen. To be part of that heritage fills me with pride when I use them.
I’m really looking forward to being at the museum for two days of making rakes and demonstrating how effective these simple tools are at a fair based around a time of hand working. I can’t wait to see what other demonstrations are there so if you’re in the area, call in and see what’s going on.
Driving down into Edale valley on friday lunchtime Christiane and I could see the giant marquee set up and our anticipation started to mount. We spotted a few friends straight away and the spoon talk started. I’d arrived early to meet up with 
The rest of the weekend was a bit of a blur. None of us had expected the demand for spoon courses with the queue stretching the length of the marquee and back so we all added extra sessions to try and get everyone into their chosen session. I was running a workshop called ‘Improve your spoons’, focusing on the design element of wooden spoons as well as demonstrating my carving process. It was a lot to fit into the 1½ hr sessions which inevitably overran and there was hardly time to take a breath but I was feeding off the buzz and enthusiasm which was everywhere.
A look behind the camera during the filming at Brantwood House when I was asked to teach John Craven to scythe for BBC tv’s Countryfile. I would have preferred to give John some instruction in advance but they wanted it ‘live’ for the programme and, with a bit of help, he got a few good strokes. This was all complicated by having to repeat the lesson for different camera angles, trying to remember what I’d said first time while John pretended to take his first cut again.
My one-day beginner’s scythe courses take place near Kendal in the Lake District where you will spend a day learning to how to use the scythe in a safe and efficient way. Courses cost £60 and include the use of my scythe kits which are available to buy on the day.
After teaching so many beginners to scythe this summer, it was great to see some of them back for my Improver’s course at the weekend. Like any skill, learning to scythe well takes time and practise and it helps to have someone check your progress. For this course I organised few different mowing situations to cover different skills.
We started in the orchard with a clean sward which was short but lying over from the weather. The mowing was deceptively tricky but gave me an opportunity to watch people and work with them on their ‘tai-chi’ style encouraging them to stand up straighter or make more use of their legs while mowing. In between mowing, I gave some help with sharpening and moved people on from the kneeling technique I teach to beginners. Being in the orchard also meant we could also do some trimming around the trees, mulching them at the same time without damaging the tree.
After lunch came my favourite part, a steep bank covered with tall weeds including hogweed, rosebay willowherb and raspberry canes. It’s the sort of thing that looks like awful work but with a scythe and good technique is actually fairly easy, efficient and lots of fun. Adjusting their grip on the scythe and explaining how to cut thicker material meant that the group could work through the weeds without hacking and risking damage to the blades.
Sunday started with a few of us spreading out the grass for hay before the peening course. This was the usual raucus affair with seven people hammering away to shape their blades. These days are important for me to teach good technique, give people the confidence to peen and take away the fear of damaging the blades. Ali and Ian had some damage to their blades so I took them through the process of filing out the nicks and using the flat anvil to peen out metal into the gap. Once peened, we sharpened the blades with a succession of whetstones before taking them back out to try on the meadow.
Just back from another weekend running a Learn to Scythe course. This week Christiane and I went to teach the folk of Sustainable Edale who want to mow their community orchard. It’s great that word of my scythe workshops had spread from down the road at Bradwell, where I ran a scything course earlier in the year and that my good mate 
After setting up the scythes we went off to see the orchard to be met by 4 acres of tall tough grasses including sedges and reeds. This kind of vegetation is not the place to first learn the tai-chi scythe movement so we spent the afternoon practising on some shorter, cleaner grass in the village. Then Christiane, Robin, Jojo and I went back over to the orchard in the evening to open up a swath through the grass which was shoulder high in places. With the job well done, we rewarded ourselves with an excellent homemade 
This week I got a call asking if I would teach John Craven to scythe for an episode of the BBC’s Countryfile programme. They were filming at Brantwood House and focussing on John Ruskin’s work in training and education. My recent “Learn to Mow with an Austrian Scythe” course tied in the training aspect with the gardens and also gave an excuse to get John to try out something new for the viewers.
Happily, the tv crew brought some southern weather with them and we had the first hot summer day for several weeks. The grass was getting on a bit but still had a last flush of flowers and cut sweetly for camera. Hopefully this will show the mowing as the efficient and pleasant work I promote and teach.
The local press and a surprising number of local photoraphers turned out to watch the races. Some friends from the NW Scythe Group turned up to take part but the majority of the field was composed of the course students who did brilliantly and it was hard to remember that they’d only learned to mow the day before. This was a sprint event over a short distance so the times were quick and the grass was flying.
It wasn’t exactly sunny but we stayed dry for most of the weekend and the students from the Findhorn Foundation and the surrounding community were out tackling some long heavy grass which was lying over from the wind and rain. It cut sweetly though and the sward was clean which made it swift cutting, I was a bit jealous to be busy with teaching and not mowing along with the team.
The second day started with an in-depth discussion and demonstrations of scythe peening. This is a group who will be scything a lot so they wanted to get as much information as possible during the weekend so we covered a lot of ground. For the afternoon Nick wanted to try and tackle the rougher patches of the field that the contractor has left out when he’s been mowing. These had grown up thick with docks, thistles and other weeds tangled into each other and flattened partly by the weather and partly by people walking through. This gave us a chance to look at trimming methods and to demonstrate the toughness of the Austrian scythes.
This year has been difficult for hay-making, to say the least and we had been discussing various racking methods from old agriculture books. Philip, who’d lived on Orkney, demonstrated making a tripod and we filled it with grass to dry. Ideally the grass has at least a day of decent weather to start the drying process before racking so more can be put on each tripod. Nick will have his work cut out for him to harvest his crop but hopefully some of the rest of the group will go back to help him out with it.
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