Bronze Age Boat Building

Academics from the University of Essex in England set out to recreate a Bonze Age stitched boat from oak and yew withies using traditional tools. As the little preamble in the video states, the design is based on 3 vessels discovered between 1937 and 1963 at North Ferriby on the Humber Foreshore. It’s being built at the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, Cornwall, by Brian Cumby and many volunteers (3:15. Hello!) and will hopefully be launched in early March. 







And this appears to be episode 1 again, but is a quick recap of the whole thing and the follow on from episode 7 starting at about the 3:00, 3:30 mark.

Primitive Shoes by Margrethe Hald

For any one with an interest in making simple shoes of some form, and would like to try something other than moccasins, or has an interest in primitive skills from different parts of the world, this will be appealing. A thorough treatise on simple shoes from Denmark predominantly, and other parts of northern Europe as well, from about the Viking age and earlier.

Primitive Shoes by Margrethe Hald

Night in a wikiup

I cobbled this wikiup together a few years back, and it’s still standing. Decided to go and spend a night in it. Spent a lot of hours gathering up bags of leaves to build up the walls. (Not necessarily something that anyone would carry with them, but if anyone ever decides to build one of these for fun, close to home on their property, a leaf rake would be a hugely helpful tool to have. One of those hoops with a handle to hold plastic bags open as well.)

That’s about as far as I got before dark. It would have to do. It really needed two, three times the load of leaves I managed to gather.

I would ordinarily have made a shelter much smaller than this. I opted to work with this framework since it was already standing. It had been a long time since I had built a debris shelter, and I guess I forgot how much work gathering up the leaves required to cover a shelter this size was.

I guess I should have thought to move my stuff out of the way before snapping a photo of the interior. Whoops.

I had good insulation with me, good underpad, layers to wear, but it was still a chilly night. For one person, for sleeping, a shelter this size is probably too big. But if you’re in an area for a length of time, a shelter like this might make sense as a living/working area.

Wikiup

This is a wikiup I built a few years ago. Leaves piled up as high and thick as possible up the sides, ultimately make it a pretty comfortable shelter.