About wood and water

I had the chance to attend a woodland workshop last week, learning how to light bonfires and whittle spoons. It was fun, taking a small axe to a chunk of birch branch to take off the largest excess parts, then taking a small whittling knife to the wood to carve a more delicate outline, and then a hook knife to carve out the inside of the spoon bowl. The image above is after fifteen minutes with the axe and straight whittling knife.

I got hooked. I bought a crook knife online and had to prove my age before they’d send it on. I thought I’d grown out of proving my age when I was seventeen and applying for a pint of cider with a straight face, but no, into my sixties and sending a copy of my driving licence to prove I was responsible to have a sharp edge.

The spoon has been sitting in my fridge for the last week and has been whittled into a pretty respectable spoon shape by now, a couple of millimetres at a time. The real wood work has been going on in our living room today, with the carpenter returning to plane and stack the oak boards to finish our floor.

The grain is beautiful, distinctive, the story of the tree it was clearly written. The dark patch with a black heart to it was where someone nailed a bird box or notice to the living tree and used an iron nail, tannalising the wood. The knotholes appear where branches were. The lines of grain are the years it spent growing. All this will be our living room floor. I can’t wait.

I was encouraged to return to the community wood this morning to talk to our local water board. The committee want to find the water source to set up a water-pipe, and despite finding the water taps and the rough direction, finding the pipes themselves is proving a challenge. The water board arrived with its computers; I brought my dowsing rods. Snipped off bits of coat hangers, I ought to say, but they do work. I’m no expert, but I did trace the outlines of a buried well and underground spring with them, and had two solid twitches for the water pipe in the wood.

The water board man didn’t laugh. He was encouraging. He said he’d seen dowsing rods used with real success in the past and advised me to hold them looser to let them indicate without my interference. Again, two solid twitches – now marked with blue paint – and when the other committee member there tried her luck, she got twitches in exactly the same places. We’re digging for the water pipe in the right place, just not yet deep enough – probably four feet or more down. And maybe digging in earth frozen solid in minus temperatures is not ideal.

Roll on Spring.