Build Week 13, 9th Sept 2019

There has been quite a break on the Roundhouse Building front, but now we’re ready to get back and get at it.

During the quite time Beeston Castle ran a number of educational events for the Volunteer Teams. The idea is to build up a wealth of knowledge within the Team about Bronze Age life that can be brought to the fore when working with Visitors to the Castle and its Roundhouse. An example of such an event was a “Sprang Workshop”.

Sprang is an ancient fabric making method. Sprang material has an in-built, natural elasticity. Its appearance is similar to netting, but unlike netting sprang is constructed entirely from warp threads. Hairnets and bonnets in Late Roman and Byzantine Egypt

Here are some photos from the workshop, and yes it was held in our Roundhouse…

Anyways, back to Build Week 13. We can put some of the finishing touches to the roof, but we stopped short of actually finishing the roof so that we can have a topping out ceremony in our last Build Week.

If you remember a pile of Bracken was harvested from around Beeston Castle with the intention of using it to roof the annex. Well, we have used it on the roof. Try and spot it?!

What we thought was a lot of bracken, once dried and applied to the roof didn’t cover as much as we had hoped. Oh well, at least we had water reed to complete the annex roof with.

The Build Team was supplied with around 6 or 7 steel Adzes. The majority were ones of recent manufacture obtained from Amazon or some such site. They were described as small two-handed adzes. Turns out they were really quite large and very heavy with a very wide blade. They were very difficult to use and even more difficult to achieve a good finish to the work piece. Almost everybody hated them, with the result that most of the Build Team avoided doing any Adze-work.

There was one Steel Adze that was much older. It was lighter, with a narrower blade, a better shaped and more comfortable handle and seemed to have an ideal angle between blade and handle. Everybody who used it quickly came to appreciate the difference a good tool can make. Needless to say there was much competition to lay claim to the adze for any work that needed to be done.

But horror or horrors! Right at the start of this build week the handle for this “king of adzes” let go.

This was almost too much to bear and there was much wailing and crying and excalamations like “if you think I’m gonna use any of those other crappy adzes think again!”. But after a cup of calming tea and Bourbon Biscuit or two, sense prevailed. We have been building up a wealth of wood working skills over the last few weeks, the solution to our problem was to be found from within ourselves. We should just apply what we have learnt and manufacture a new handle. Simple really, or at least that’s what we thought.

So that’s what I did. Using the the pieces of the old handle as a pattern I grabbed a piece of Ash and began to fashion a replacement. After one aborted attempt where I got the measurements and angles completey backwards, we had a result.

Aprt from roofing and tool repairs, there was plenty of other activities taking place during the course of this week.

A start was made on creating daub for the walls. As there was exactly zero experience in the group on the ideal daub recipe we began with a few test pieces around the building trying out various recipes of daub. We varied materials, proportions and consistencies (wet-dryness) of the daub. Allowed them to dry and then gave them a poke or two. The recipe we settled upon consisted of chopped strands of water reed, coarse sandy material from the quarry floor, organic material from the floor of the wooded areas and a little water. The mixture was well mixed and worked until was able to bind with itself. It was then fashioned into canon ball or elephant dung shape for ease of transport and actuial application to the wattle walls. We found the most effective application technique was to work as a pair, one either side of the wattle and to simultaneously apply daub to the inside and outside surfaces.

We began the process of making window frames from Ash.

We continued to manufacture the two main doors for the House. There was some talk that these particular doors would be temporary affairs that could be made relatively quickly to align with the amount of time left on the build. These temporary doors would then be replaced by ones of more substantial design, fully planked after an example of a door found during an excavation somewhere in Denmark. We’ll see, I have my doubts.

The back door was also made. This design was based on evidence obtained about building practices in Ireland.

My project for the week, along with Leo, was to begin the manufactuire of furniture for the house. The plan we settled upon was to make planks from the Larch Logs and to use them to make a box bed frame. Our inspiration was the stone framed box beds of Skara Brae. We intended to join the planks of our box using pierced mortice and tenons with tusk pegs. We also had the ambition that the majority, if not all, the work would be accomplished with wooden, stone or bronze tools.

We didn’t get off to the best of starts though. The Larch had been down for over a year and was very knotty and with twisty grain. The splitting of the logs into useful half and quarter planks was incredibly hard work. It took a very long time and required us to make legions of wooden splitting wedges. Our scrappage rate was also quite high, in that we did not always manage to split a log to produce something that could become a plank. When we did achieve a “plankable” outcome, it was very rough and was going to require a lot of subsequent work with Axe and Adze to achieve a plank suitable for the job and pretty enough to be furntiture.

Historic Concepts Blog

Last modified on 2019-09-15