After years of
living a city life, and feeling the effects of a lost connection with my rural
roots, I went back to live in the country to work with trees. There was no big
plan. One of the more romantic ideas was to plant a musical woodland - maple
and rosewood for guitars, spruce for violins etc. It was a shortlived idea
dreamed up in a Spanish city where trees in their pollarded contortions, were a
decorative backdrop to city life. .
That was nearly
twenty years ago and although the musical arboretum was the first and the most
misguided of many ideas it raised the question early on as what my place could
be in the countryside after so long a displacement.
Green Woodworking
My way back along
this natural path started with green woodwork, which at the time was beginning
its slow renaissance inspired by the late Bill Hogarth, and led by Mike Abbot,
Hal Wynn Jones and others.
Unlike modern
carpentry, the starting point with green woodwork is the tree itself and not a
stack of timber in a DIY store. Learning the names of our native trees and
their properties, their stories and management, about coppicing, pollarding,
the underwood and the wildwood, the countryside slowly started to be more
familiar and less strange. All of a sudden a new world opened out and a walk in
the woods was never the same again.
Green woodwork
follows the grain of the wood, mirroring the natural curves of the tree. It
retains that link with what it was as a tree right through to what it will
become.
Working with what you find growing in
your local woods rather than what has been imported and industry graded,
teaches you a new way of seeing .You learn to use the knots, the awkward bends
of the wood, the spirals caused by honeysuckle on a hazel rod for example; your
eye learns a new greenwood language.
Children of
almost any age can work with green wood; I spent many hours supervising
children as young as three as they whittled pointy sticks with teeth gritted
determination. (Despite the length and sharpness of the blade, a drawknife, if
properly handled, is a very safe tool).
To start with we
didn’t use a tape measure but instead used body measurements so that the chair,
stool or yurt would be made using your own proportions just by taking a
measurement off your hand or outstretched fingers. You could be numerically
dyslexic and still make stuff.
My first yurt
followed some months after these discoveries, and became, without ever
intending it, the first of many. I lived in it for a year and after a short while
people started asking me to make others. Local shows and festivals were the
lifeblood of rural crafts before the Internet appeared and it was through one
of these that a chance meeting led to a visit to the ancestral home of the yurt
in Central Asia.
The Ancestral Home of Yurts
I had heard of
whole valleys on the far western borders of Kyrgyzstan covered with yurts as
far as you could see. This
National Geographic picture of the country that I held in my head was romantic
but wrong. If the Kyrgyz had not turned their backs on their nomadic life
completely, the process was well underway by the time I got there. Independence
from the old Soviet Union had meant that that the export market for sheep, the
mainstay of their economy, had collapsed. With so few sheep it was no longer viable
to spend the summer months up in the mountain pastures in their yurts.
In the
countryside the yurts that once crowded the valleys were now more frequently
erected by the roadside as cafés or stalls selling mares milk (kumis),
watermelons and coca cola.
In the city, the
yurts were often left unassembled in apartment corridors and old garages, and
erected only for weddings and funerals.
The visit to
Kyrgyzstan was followed by two trips to Mongolia to learn about the Ger with
its low flat profile, straight roof poles and supporting poles (bagana) in the
centre, very different from the Central Asian Yurt with its tall, steep, domed
outline with bent roof poles and open central space.
Similar moves were taking place in
Mongolia with a third of the population living in and around the capital Ulaan
Bator, but many Mongolians still lived in their gers even in the city itself.
The connection to their nomadic roots is still very strong and it was not
unusual to meet university students who could whittle from a piece of wood,
spin wool, do embroidery, sew and of course they could all ride a horse, though
most now didn’t need to.
Traditionally
yurts and gers are made from wood
(willow, larch, birch) for the frame and sheep’s wool felt for the
covering and are held together with horsehair cord, rope and rawhide. The
animals the nomads depend on and the earth they live on provide the materials
they make their homes with.
The decoration
inside can be plain or ornate, the wood painted or carved, the tent bands woven,
the wall hangings stitched and embroidered.
The interior lay
out reflects a distinct social order, there is a place for women, place for
men, a place for honoured guests, for the shrine, and for cooking, there is
respect given to the elders, a reverence for the wheel,“the eye to the heavens”
and the stove, always in the centre where the four elements, earth, air, fire
and water meet.
The two bagana
(central supports) in a Mongolian ger should not be leaned against. They are
usually made of birch, a sacred tree and are a symbolic link between the earth
and the sky.
The manufacture
and decoration of yurts and gers, the way they are used embody a whole culture,
a culture that has a deep respect for the earth, for the role of the family and
the ways the two come together.
If the migrations
in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan were towards the cities, a move in a different
direction was underway in the UK. Escape to the Country TV, Country Living
Exhibitions and River Cottage recipes
fuelled our appetite for rural life as people were moving to the country
in search of more fulfilling lives.
As this interest
in country living grew, so too did an interest in yurts; more people wanted to
buy them, make them, live in them, run schools in them, dance and tell stories
in them, and to holiday in them.
Yurts as nurturing spaces
So if we weren’t
turning into nomads what exactly was the appeal of these round tents? Our
ancestors lived in round houses of one sort of another and perhaps deep down we
find the round space and communal family living, supportive and nurturing.
The yurts we make
at Yurtworks are from wood that has grown locally, and while some machines are
used in the process they are made principally by hand, with the marks of the
hand tools left on the wood. They
are made from ash (the Norse “tree of life “) and although they have some
modern components so that they work well in our climate they retain the spirit
of their Mongolian and Kyrgyz counterparts.
When someone
speaks or sings in a yurt you tend to listen more intently. The domed roof
provides a good acoustic and words are not lost down corridors or your eye
distracted by corners and windows. When you are inside you are properly inside
not gazing out at the view.
Living in a yurt
involves the whole family usually in a single room, and when you share a space
so closely you have to be organised, respect each other and work together. Our
experiences of yurt living began when our youngest was 13months old. The cold
nights of May were kept at bay with layers of woollen blankets. The night feeds
led to fires being rekindled accompanied by the call of owls in the oak trees
nearby, then snuggling under the covers again to awaken with the yurt warm and
ready for the coming day.
Both our children
of 4 and 15 years still enjoy yurt life. The circular space means we are always
together, within sight which is
very reassuring and creates an immense sense of security. Opening the door to a diverse and
beautiful landscape,
brings a sense of connection to the earth, the animals here and to our
ancestors. A chance encounter at dawn as a deer listens to the wind unaware of
other eyes watching.
It is a very
powerful reminder that we share this land with so many other creatures and that
we are a small part in the jigsaw.
The daily tasks
can be shared out, the collection of wood, lighting the fire, fetching water,
lighting candles , drying clothes, washing, cooking etc. It all takes longer
and it is no less repetitive than in a house.
Evenings are marked with the ritual of
lighting lanterns, a magical light with shadows dancing on the roof space.
Stories and songs bring a gentle close to a busy day. Adapting life to daylight
hours is a welcome change, allowing us rest time, free from other distractions
which a house provides.The solar lighting, a useful aid when cooking, reading
and doing paperwork is our only source of electricity.
When the manual
tasks, the so called chores, take up more time the distinction between work and life becomes blurred.
This is one of
the myths perhaps, this idea that there is the right balance between work and life as if they were different from each
other. It has taken me a while to
realise that work, when you can bring your heart, head and hands into what you
do, IS life. Work is not always
soulless toil and life is not a quest for some kind of hedonistic utopia.
As the Mongolians and the Kyrgyz
continue on their paths away from their nomadic lives towards the cities and
their own industrial and technological revolutions, many in the west are
starting to journey in the opposite direction to make their own old earth
connections.
If we carry with
us a sense of humility and a belief that we can be a life giving presence in
Nature and not a destructive one, perhaps we shall find our place there again.
Tim Hutton and Naomi Parslow
