Bog Myrtle & Peat

Still hot off the back of The Mabinogion and the fragments of Taliesin, I can’t escape the significance of ash trees as an icon of warfare. It’s said that in the Dark Ages, ash was grown around farm buildings and villages so that local folk would always have ready access to poles for spears, and when the ploughshare was beaten into a sword, wood was near at hand. The cover of my copy of Y Gododdin (translated by Gillian Clarke) is decorated in spearheads, and for all that I’m supposed to be approaching my forties, there’s still a thrilling buzz to be found in the vision of Brittonic warriors raging in the dawn mist, and a bristling schiltron of ash poles at Falkirk. 

In later and more peaceful years, ash found a domesticated existence around the farmyard, and I read that ash wood was used for cart poles and tool handles. The quality of ash is going down the pan in these days of chalera die-back, and it’s unusual to find a nice length of the wood without some discoloration in its heart. Three of my own big trees came down on a barn at the back of the hill during storm Arwen, and when I went to split them up for firewood, one was so cavernously hollow it reminded me of that story about blue wales being so big that a man can swim up their aortas. From a section three feet wide, there was only a three inch circumference of white wood to feed the leaves above, and the rest was just owl nests and bees’ bykes. The other two trees were solid, but the heartwood was black and when I split them open the sap smelled bitter and wrong. Given time to rot, they’d have wound up hollow too. 

Wanting get a sense of the wood (and pretend that I would soon ride to the Battle of Catraeth), I saved some ash from a storm in 2018 and dried it in lengths of three or four feet long. This was good stuff, and it was hewn with satisfying ease in the summer of 2020. I have collected a wide assortment of old axe and hammer heads left over or discovered in middens and dumps, so I decided to rehandle these with my ash and see if there was any way I could feel closer to the ancient kingdoms of yore.

It took a long time to make the handles. You can’t turn them on a lathe because you don’t want a perfect cylinder for something like an axe or a lump hammer. You want an oval with contours in various places to fit your own two hands; that calls for a rasp and plenty of patience. When you’ve got a decent shape, you’re free to do all the fun stuff; splitting the top and driving a wedge in to spread the wood for a better grip, and I even found old iron rings to hammer in and strengthen it further.

But I’ve now made five ash handles for axes and hammers, and every single one has shattered, always just below the joint with the head where it splinters and weakens itself to a break. It’s happened so often that I have started to doubt the value of ash for tools or high-impact use, and for all that I loved the associations of ancient warfare, I’m not sure why the wood was so highly valued as a weapon. Ash has been fine to make handles for smaller and less jarring tools like shovels, sickles and shawing knives, but it would be downright hazardous to face a cavalry charge of English Knights armed only with a few shattery beams of yellow wood. Of course there are a hundred different variables at work here, and I am only playing – but it has raised questions I’d like to answer.

I’ve made better progress with oak handles for axes, but it’s heavy and it’s slower to work. Besides, if I get a nice piece of oak, I’m usually more inspired to make a chair or carve it into a pig or a wyvern than waste it on restoring a pick when I already have three or four to share the work of one I need. I’d be very sorry to accept the easy option, but unless any readers have a better suggestion, I’m starting to worry that American hickory might be the best available stuff.

The picture above is an ash handle top emerging through the hole of a 1950s era splitting axe head. It has a hornbeam wedge and has been reinforced with a steel ring. I’m proud of this job, but it’s all for nothing because the ash cracked immediately below the head and I had to burn this out to start again… using hickory.