The Old Ways - Along side our bee-keeping and gardening, we have been developing an interest in these other traditional English crafts. Enjoy!

Scythes?

Maybe you think this is a bit odd - mental picture of dear old Mike with a straw hanging from the corner of his mouth, big billowing smock and a pot of cider nearby. Well you would be right about the cider anyway.

However we aren’t stuck in the 19th Century, things have moved on with scythes as with a lot of things and we now have the Austrian scythe. This is not new to Austria, of course, but it breaks British (and North American) tradition because it has huge advantages over that big clumsy grim-reaper thing you are probably used to seeing. It is much lighter – therefore less tiring and it is better at cutting.

The blades on our scythes are manu-factured to a very high standard in Styria but the stathe (the handle) is made during the winter by a Swiss farmer and his family. The stathe is not made by steaming and curving the wood, it is cut from a single piece and in any case is not as dramatically curved as the traditional British type. This gives it more strength but with much lighter weight. The blade too is very strong but flexible and light. The Scythe Shop in South Petherton, Somerset has a website run by the owner, Simon Fairlie which is well worth viewing.

We use our scythes wherever we can. It is true that there are a few situations where a lawn mower (usually the non-powered push type) or even a strimmer have to be used but these are kept to a bare minimum. We believe that this approach is not only more eco-friendly but is very satisfying in action.

One particular use, as beekeepers, is mowing around beehives with a scythe thereby avoiding the annoyance caused to the bees by the sound of a petrol strimmer.

We are happy to show you how they work just call us or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we will try to get you along next time we are scything.

Dry Stone Walling

Dry-stone walls are not something you might immediately associate with South London, so any useful application was quite unlikely, despite which we decided to treat ourselves to a weekend away in Cumbria and take a course. We stayed in a farmhouse B&B near Ambleside, by Windermere and the course was run about 3 or 4 miles away at the opposite end of Langdale. This a beautiful spot, owned by the National Trust but with working farms in the valley and hillsides.

We were put to work to repair about 10 metres of wall with five other people including our friend and former bee student, Jenny.  Our instructor  Dan ( Dan, Dan the Walling Man) gave us a potted history of the local walls which were probably first started 700-800 years ago, through the simple process of farmers removing the large number of obstructive rocks and stones to make tilling the fields easier and piling them into walls around the field.  Later history is a sad story of the Enclosures Acts and rich men (and Abbeys) displacing the peasants who ironically had to erect the very walls that would bar them from their own holdings.

The last of the walls was probably laid in Napoleonic times to reclaim very marginal land for crop growing in a time of national shortages. In the years that followed the more profitable sheep changed the landscape from mixed arable to grazing land that now predominates.

This photo shows the clean bed of the wall about to be re-laid with a base course. The wall took about 9 hours work for eight of us over two days though one skilled man can probably build about 2.5 metres a day.

As work progresses one problem is climbing over the growing wall as it gets higher – as in this case the alternative was a ten minute walk to the nearest gate, down the lane and back up the hill again. The shape of the wall’s profile is marked by 2 meter steel rods (pins) with string lines to follow the ace of the wall. In this case the main material was cob-stones, i.e. rounded stones that are quite difficult to get into a secure position. In different parts of the country and indeed in places quite nearby, other material such as slate, sandstone, limestone etc are used. A rock hammer is pretty useless on cob-stones so it probably needs more skill to lay a wall.

 End of day one we stood proudly in front of the wall, three-quarters rebuilt, photographed by the non-participating wife of one of the team. The following morning we were about to start again when Dan accidentally leant on a part of the existing wall at one end our own work and it collapsed. He then demonstrated speed-walling without a trace of shame!

 By lunchtime we were hoisting the younger members to the far side of the wall which, being on a slope now at head height was becoming too much for the old farts like me to climb. The team was working in bright sunlight and it was very warm, apparently quite a change in the recent local weather. We drank considerable amounts of bottled water in a place where the natural water could not possibly be clearer!

At last we were finished. The wall was capped off with stones that were oddly shaped because apart from their lack of usefulness in the wall, this provided an added deterrent for sheep to scale the wall, thereby dislodging bits. It was very satisfying standing next to a fairly seamless wall. One could not but think of the way in which our peasant ancestors worked the walls. Of course they would be expected to complete much more wall  and would spend each night whilst on the jobtrying to sleep huddled at the foot of the wall they were building in all weathers. Even on  the high slopes of the fells above, the Abbots and Lords had them building boundary walls. The words, “a hard life” come nowhere near touching upon the truth.

 The wallers are justly proud of their work and this was evidenced in a wall-end which incorporates slabs of slate imported from a quarry about three miles away.

The day wound down with a longish winding walk through the fields looking at the various stone walls and enjoying the walk before a well-earned pint at the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel half a mile along the valley. Then we said goodbye and drove off over a very steep road across a nearby pass, taking the long way back to our B&B.

The views were spectacular and we could just about pick out the piece of restored wall we had left to posterity.