If you thought Bowyers were sausages - then think again. The ancient craft of bow making is alive and well, or kicking at least judging by the talented bowyers that I have encountered in the last couple of months. At the Furnace this year Dave Mercer joined the woodland craft demonstrators and we were entranced by the depth of understanding of the wood and its properties that is encompassed in the process of bow making. Here Dave is just about to start work on an ash blank that has been stored for a couple of years before it can be used.
The sheer range of different bows was fascinating, not just the different types of wood that can be used but also the wide variations in design of the bows, some of which date back many thousands of years.
Dave demonstrates a lovely ash bow with a relatively low draw strength, so that even I could draw it (my apologies if my knowledge of technical terms for archery is inadequate).
These two ash bows that Dave was working on are both based upon archeological discoveries that are thousands of years old, one from the Somerset levels and one (I think I've remembered rightly) from a similar bog in Denmark. What interested me was the different ways in which the bow is designed to cope with the pull and how each bow is designed to bend in different ways. Dave knows a thing or two about wood, especially yew, as he is also the Reserve Warden for Kingley Vale National Nature Reserve on the South Downs above Chichester. Kingley Vale includes an amazing yew forest, one of the finest in Western Europe, as well as 14 scheduled ancient monuments, so it's fitting that a Bowyer should manage it.
This graceful little bow turns out to be made from birch and is to an american indian design, and of course we couldn't resist having a go with it. Go on the birch!
No comments:
Post a Comment