Making Hurdles 14 January, 2009

Transcript

Alan King: This is a bundle of coppice hazel. We call each individual piece a rod. And it's cut from carefully managed coppices every seven to eight years. That produces these long, straight lengths of hazel, with very few knots, which is what we need for weaving hazel hurdles. The first stage in making a hurdle is to select one of the rods of hazel and to split it right down the middle, which is done like this.

[sound of splitting]

Alan King: There are, in fact, several different ways of splitting or cleaving hazel. And the way I do it, being careful to start the split in the middle of the rod... [sound of splitting]

Alan King: I open the split just using the billhook. And then I feed the rod onto this post. And steering it all the time to avoid the split running out to one side or the other. I just run down the whole length of the rod, forcing it through any knots, right to the end of the rod. [crunching sounds]

Alan King: And that's it. One rod split into two halves. Then the split rods are actually woven into the hurdle. They're woven in and out of the nine vertical pieces, which, all of these things have local names. And generally, these verticals all called sails, and the horizontals, the one that you weave with, they're called ethers or weavers. And every three or four inches in the height of the hurdle, these ethers are twisted back and woven back into the hurdle the other way. And that, of course, is what holds the whole hurdle together. There are no nails or screws or anything like that in a hurdle. The whole thing is held together by the twists around the end.

The hurdle is made in a heavy piece of timber called a mold. Here I'm using an old railway sleeper, but any heavy piece of timber will do. And in that heavy piece of timber, we have nine holes drilled, not in a straight line, but in a slight curve, and into those nine holes go vertical members called sails. They go right through the heavy timber and stick into the ground so that they're relatively firm, and then all of the horizontal members are woven in and out of those nine verticals.

Various different regions where hurdles are made have their own distinctive styles of hurdle-making. And even within those regions, individual hurdle-makers will have their own methods.

I like to finish the top of my hurdles with four round rods. And when they are all in position, the ends are finished by forming what we call a hurdle-maker's knot. And that consists of twisting one of these rods right round the end sail. It goes around twice, like so. And I will then trim this off and tuck it back into the weave so that it will never come undone. So I just trim that to length.

[cutting sound]

Alan King: And then... [hammering sounds]

Alan King: Making this piece as flexible as I can, having opened out the rods, I will just tuck that in. And that is firmly fixed and will never come undone. And the same thing happens at the other end of the hurdle. They are all trimmed off, as are the spikes on the bottom, the bits that stick through the heavy piece of timber. And that's your finished hurdle. Wattle hurdles were, of course, used by the thousand for penning sheep in the heyday of sheep farming, particularly across the south of England. Unfortunately, nobody uses them for that purpose now, and hurdles are now almost exclusively used in gardens, as fencing, screening, and for windbreaks. They're particularly suitable for that because they allow a certain amount of wind to pass through them.

Angus Hanton: How much does a hurdle like this cost?

Alan King: I currently charge 14 pounds per vertical foot. This is a four-foot high hurdle. So, four times 14, in pounds.