Steam festival at the Weald & Downland

Last weekend was the Steam Festival at the Weald & Downland museum. As you might imagine there is a lot of gear about, loads of big boys toys, the dream of all the would-be engine drivers. So I set up on Friday to avoid the rush and with plenty to keep me and the museum visitors amused as the steam engines huffed and puffed around the site.



I spent a lot of time working to make fresh stock. For some reason spurtles were particularly popular at this show and of course rounders bats. I also sold 3 bags of shavings so I'm quite pleased with the way it's going, but rather than post pictures of more dibbers here are some of the pictures of the big boys toys.

The Fowler showman's engine is particularly stunning with its decoration and attention to detail on the paintwork. It's called 'Lion' and it runs so smoothly that you can hardly hear it coming. It caught some visitors talking to the blacksmiths by surprise when they failed to notice it rolling up behind them!

This series II landrover arrived at the showground in style, being towed by a traction engine.

The steam carousel is powered by its own steam engine named 'Warrior' but Lion's dynamo generator is used to run the hundreds of lights which make it such an eye catching sight.



All in all there were over a dozen steam engines from showman's engines to ploughing engines and road rollers, as well as some rare steam lorries, a steam car and even a steam bicycle. I don't think you are supposed to ask why put a steam engine on a bicycle? I probably shouldn't mention the steam gramaphone!


Come Saturday evening a run to the pub is becoming a tradition. Several engines took part but a lot of people caught a lift on this wagon. The return journey was not quiet or subtle, the engines on their way back from the pub were audible for miles around and the crowd singing on the tailer even for even further.


Sunday dawned a perfect late summers day, with swiftly vanishing mist and the sun heaving itself languidly back into the sky. Very quiet after a busy day and a night full of steam whistles and singing.


A lot more visitors on Sunday meant that almost 50 people ganged up in the arean to try and heave this road roller backwards across the grass. And once the sneaky driver was made to remove the chock from the wheels they succeeded in some style.

Wagon wheels in the late afternoon sunshine. No steam, but they caught my eye.

and then it was time to take the toys home again.

Three men went to mow.....

.....went to mow an orchard, two men (and a girl), one man and an angry hive of bees went to mow an orchard.......repeat until done.

That's the short version. The long version goes like this. Judy agreed to let us have a go at cutting the superb wild flower meadow alongside her orchard once the yellow rattle had set seed. Roy came along with his scythe so we could try mowing with a team of three.



We met on Friday afternoon to do the work but soon after we started the sun came out and with it the bees from one of the hives in the orchard. Once they found us they started to get quite aggressive. Discretion being the better part of valour (well it is for me) we decided to try again on Saturday evening.


Judy's son Richard joined us on Saturday evening to try his hand at mowing and made quite a good job of it for a first time. The bees were completely quiet and we could mow right upto the hives.


With three scythes we got through the orchard rapidly and we finished before it got dark though less cider might have left the rows a little straighter.

These windrows would have made good hay in a couple of days but unfortunately we had no takers for it on this occasion. Perhaps by next year I'll have figured out a market for 'hand cut' 'wild flower meadow' loose hay and be able to sell it at a premium. I'm only half joking.

polelathe - Spinning a Top

A friend of mine, Robin Fawcett (you can find him here on his Treewright blog) put up an excellent video of how to make a spinning top on youtube and on his blog. I've been meaning to make one for quite a while but there always seems to be something more urgent to do first. So with Robin's excellent instructions it seemed now is the time to try it out.


Robin makes them with their own handle to launch them and this means that you can get them to run quite fast and stay spinning for a couple of minutes or more. The shaft of the top fits through the wide hole of the handle and you pull a cord wound around the shaft out through the narrow hole to start the top. The key to this is how wide you make the top, the wider it is the more energy it can absorb from the starting cord, and this is set by the size of the blank you turn. I plan to experiment a bit with this in the future.


My first top is not the prettiest one around but it seemed to work remarkably well even on a wooden plank in the woodyard. I'll need to make a couple more before I settle on a product design but I think it will prove to be quite popular.

Earthburn - making charcoal the traditional way

On Friday evening we went to visit Alan and Jo Waters of Wildwood Coppice during their annual charcoal earthburn at their site in West Dean woods high on the South Downs near Chichester.

The 11th August is Saint Alexander's day, the patron saint of Charcoal Burners, so it's fitting that Jo and Alan host this traditional burn over this weekedn each year.


Charcoal has been made this way for thousands of years and it's only relatively recently, in the latter half of the 20th Century that steel ring kilns became widely available. The screens are used to shield the clamp from the effects of the wind. This clamp was lit at midday on Friday and will burn until Sunday. Unlike the steel rings it needs to be watched constantly and the covering of earth gently tamped and cooled to prevent the burn from breaking through and turning to ash.


The knowledge of how to build the earth clamp and maintain the burn through the process is a great skill. As only a couple of earthburn's take place in the UK each year there is a real danger that this knowledge will soon be lost, so this annual event is an important part of raising awareness of the char-colliers craft and helping to pass on the knowledge and skills.


The burn is accompanied by a good gathering of local charcoal burners and greenwood workers. Daniel here seems to be taking to mastering the art early, and even found the charcoal burners stool for a perch. A charcoal burners stool is a one legged stool, on the basis that if you fall asleep you fall over and wake up again (it's also a suitable project, if something of a niche market, for polelathe turners who find making two legs the same a problem!).


Alan also has a great collection of old paraffin Tilly lamps, which looked incredible as he slowly coaxed them into life to provide light through the night.



An earthburn is a slow process. First the neat stack of logs needs to be built and then covered with a mix of earth and straw. The clamp shown in this photograph is a large burn which took place many years ago. But Alan is promising to do another one of these next year.


Once fully covered the post in the centre of the clamp is withdrawn allowing hot embers to be pitched into the middle to light it. Once the burn is complete the fire can be doused and when cool the covering removed to reveal the cooked wood turned to charcoal.

We enjoyed seeing the earthburn and meeting up with people. Next years earthburn promises to be a very special and rare event.

....it's harvest time again

Something about working outside means that the next season always has something to look forward to. Before you know it......It's harvest time again (a Neil Young song this time). Modern agriculture with its combines, silos and dryers has made harvest time almost invisible to our society and it seems the only way we can measure it is by the effect upon the price of a white sliced loaf of bread (if you buy white sliced loaves).



You'd expect it to be a little different at the Weald & Downland museum and it is. At the same time as we were finishing the threshing flail in the woodyard, down in the museum fields the wheat harvest was being gathered. A brief gap between rainy days on Thursday allowed just enough time for the wheat stooks to be gathered from the fields and built into a traditional thatched rick to be stored before it is threshed later in the year.

Threshing will separate the grain from the straw. The grain can be ground in the museum's working watermill. but in this case the straw will be the most important part of the crop as the variety being grown is thatching wheat, needed for the repair and rebuilding of thatched roofs through Sussex, Hampshire and Dorset. The local master thatcher and his team were on hand to take part and to help ensure the harvest was successful.



In a microcosm of the way communities used to work many of the museum staff, volunteers and of course the horses join in to help with the work on the basis that 'many hands make light work'.




The sheafs of corn are pitched from the wagon to the elevator and then stacked by those working on the rick to create a steep conical shape with a thatched roof so that rain will fall off the rick and not penetrate inside.



Chatting to Ben who was pitching the sheafs onto the elevator I noticed that I could see water boiling on the small stationary engine running it's belt drive. 'This Lister engine doesn't have a closed cooling system, it cools by allowing the water to boil off from the open top of the reservoir.



The museum's little Ferguson TE20 tractor was also helping out with the work which seemed quite appropriate to me. This tractor, perhaps more than any other, brought machinery into smaller mixed farms with it's revolutionary 3 point hitch for controlling mowers and ploughs whilst being small, reliable and cheap to run. Many of these little mechanical 'work horses' are still working today on farms and smallholdings and it's the forerunner of my own little red MF135.



The next harvest I am waiting for is from the hop garden. Surely a few of these fuggles hops wouldn't be missed? Now we just need a couple of weeks of warm weather to ripen them.

......and they hired men with crab tree sticks.......

.......to flay him skin from bone. The words of the old song 'John Barleycorn' came immediately to mind on Thursday when I spent the day working in the woodyard at the Weald & Downland museum.


Because John Roberts was making a traditional threshing flail. It consists of a stout ash handle, about 4 ft in length which is connected by a rotating leather and wood joint to the beater,



The wooden joint is carved from ash and is the key to allowing the flailing action as it forms a rotating joint on the end of the handle.


Once carved the ash for the joint needs to be boiled up, in this case in the kettle over the fire,



........until it's flexible enough to be formed into a loop that can be secured to the handle of the flail with twine

...........over the ball which allows the hinge to rotate around the end of the handle. Simples?

The flailing stick or beater can then be attached by a leather thong allowing it to rotate in a second plane and gives it the freedom to swing and thresh the corn on the floor of the barn. The flail beater needs to be tough and hard, in this case it's holly but crab apple would certainly be suitable. Finally I understand the meaning of the crab tree sticks in the song. The new one that John has made is a working copy of one from the museum collection which is thought to be from the mid nineteenth century.

Marley Common - 1923

A friend found me this postcard of Marley common last week. The postmark is 1923 and it's one of the famous Frith series of cards. I really can't tell where the photo is taken from, it's different from the others I've seen and there are no obvious landmarks. What surprises me is the number of pine trees in evidence and their maturity. Photos of the nearby Devil's punchbowl and Blackdown from a similar period show no trees at all. Trees we have recently felled in this area were about 60 to 70 years old, so these would now be much older.

Off to the Weald & Downland Museum tomorrow to demonstrate polelathe turning and take part in a kid's activity day, then making brooms in the woodyard on Thursday with any luck.

Bracken - Friend or Foe ?

I can feel a bit of a bracken rant coming on. Bracken (pteridium aquilinum to give it it's posh name) is primarily a woodland plant and in most countries it does not colonise open areas. But with our maritime climate and recent warmth it strays out of the woods and can be particularly invasive on open areas around the coast and on heath and moorland.

It's this invasive behaviour which has gained it a bad reputation as a weed, but it might surprise you to hear that there are few other British herbaceous plants that have been of such economic importance.


Managing bracken as a crop was a key part of keeping it in its place. Bracken has been used for bedding, flooring, feed (croziers and rhizomes) and as a compost and mulch. In the building industry it was used as packing, thatching and dried as a fierce fuel to fire bricks and tiles. It was even used extensively in Sussex for road foundations. But the most imporant uses in this area were to provide potassium for the glass and soap/lye making industries. For this the ferns were gathered in July and August and burnt in enormous bonfires to reduce to the ashes or potash rich in potassium.


The extensive harvest gave rise to many place names where the fern was an important crop, Farnham, Farncombe and Fernhurst are local examples.

There were strict rules and laws governing the harvesting of the crop to avoid damage to the future crop and allocate areas to individuals or families.

As the common land and heathland has fallen into disuse and the demand for bracken as a crop has disappeared the fern has advanced and colonised new areas. This is particularly true of restored heathland where scrub tree cover has kept the bracken down. Once the trees are removed the bracken invades.

After a few years the bracken can gain the upper hand and then we tend to use any means at hand to prevent the bracken from suppressing the new heather growth, and generally that means spraying it with a systemic pesticide, Asulox.


We now know that the bracken contains a number of toxins, as do many plants, at least one of which is carcinogenic so eating bracken (aside from the croziers, or youngest shoots, and the very well boiled rhizomes) is off the menu. Reasearch shows that the toxins in the plant build during the season and peak around July and August when the spores are thought to be carcinogenic. But bracken does not spore every year, and apart from pushing through dense stands of spore bearing plants in August it is very likely impossible to avoid the spores amongst the thousands of varieties in the air during high summer unless you stay in town or wear a mask. So the danger from bracken spores is very probably significantly exaggerated.


Alternatives to managing bracken by spraying are cutting manually, cutting mechanically and rolling. Four years ago we decided not to spray on the Lynchmere commons and since then have been experimenting with forms of cutting and rolling. Rather than attempting to eradicate all the bracken we are focusing our efforts into some key areas to reduce or remove it. Early indications are that this strategy is working well and with each year the bracken thins out, grows smaller and easier to manage allowing us to expand our management to more areas.

It seems unlikely that bracken will make a comeback as a crop of the economic importance it used to have, but to develop some use for it would improve our ability to harvest and remove it. So I am experimenting with methods of cutting and composting it in an attempt to produce a peat free seed compost. Anyone walking across the commons might come across one of the bracken ricks that Alison and I have piled up as a part of this experiment. We'll be turning them from time to time to encourage the decomposition and monitor the progress.

Hampshire Coppice Group at the New Forest Show

I thought I'd post a few more general photos from the show last week. At big shows it's only too easy to become isolated inside the showground for the duration of the show. The New Forest show is right in the middle of some very beautiful countryside and as the camping field is at the back of the ground I took the opportunity to cycle around the forest tracks between Lyndhurst and Brockenhurst and take in some of the peace and quiet of the forest.



There is plenty to see inside the showground in addition to the woodland crafts, the machinery in the old time farming area is always impressive, this threshing or 'reeding' machine as it advertised on the side was being driven by a steam traction engine.



We were delighted that Dick Apps visited us on the stand. Dick demonstrated polelathe turning at the show for decades and is one of the founder members of the APT. He showed me that he's not lost his touch.


Dick was accompanied by his son, Dick jnr, and we were treated to two generations of Apps turning at once, in Stereo you might say. Having the poles coming from the rear is definitely not as effective as in front, but the setup at the show makes it necessary. The odd doink on the head is all a part of the job. I think the neat crease in Dick's hat was there before the show?

No it's not my tractor, no cab, but I did see this very nice MF135 in the tractor parade with an acrobat hay-turner on the back.


At the Tools For Self-Reliance stand I noticed this pair of Fids for sale. I've been meaning to make some fids, which are used for splicing rope, for a while and these were a handy reminder as well as a useful pattern for me try.


Tools For Self Reliance specialise in refurbishing old hand tools in the UK and then sending them out to Africa for a new lease of life. Here is an example of a joiners toolbox prepared and ready to send out. Tools like the fids and billhooks which are of no use in Africa are sold in the UK to raise cash, but this also helps to keep these old tools in circulation as well so they are performing a valuable recycling/reuse role in the UK as well. I've certainly bought a few tools from them over the last few years and it's good to know that my spare cash is being used well.



Dave's hazel whistles were a great hit at the show, here Dave demonstrates and keeps my niece Rebecca entranced for a while at least.


It wouldn't be the New Forest Show without the Plonkers. The New Forest Plonkers that is. Happily it's not too often that I claim to have had a beer with a plonker last night.



Dave put one of his washing machine drum cum bbq's through it's paces as a campfire in the evenings. Ir works a treat and we'll be reclaiming one of ours thats currently in use as a composter to use as a campfire. I think this one went home with Alan.