The Heart of the Woods (e-book) (used book) | Wyl Menmuir | bookbook.eu

Description

What do we get out of spending time around trees? How has our relationship with trees changed over the centuries? Who are the people who use traditional and more modern methods for creating objects from wood? What are the stories we tell ourselves about woods and forests, and what do those stories do for us? What is the future for woods and trees in the era of climate change?

A companion piece to The Draw of The Sea, this book will explore, through a series of interlinked essays, the ways in which we shape wood and are shaped by it, our relationship with trees, including those who protect them and seek them out, and those who use them for particular properties - the soundboard of a guitar, the stave of a bow, the surface of a desk.

Each essay, which will be in part social history, interview, journal and memoir, will combine a focus tree and a focus item - oak and writing desk, yew and longbow, apple and guitar. Written in close collaboration with makers, crafters, bodgers, and woodsmen and women in order to understand better the woods they know intimately, the joys and frustrations of working with a living material, and the stories of their craft and skills, this is also a book about legacies - those a parent leaves to a child, those a society leaves to the next generation, and the legacies left by specific trees in specific places.

As with The Draw of The Sea, each essay will be accompanied by a series of beautiful images, of tools and processes, beautiful objects created from different woods, the makers, and the trees themselves.

Chapters include:

WOODLAND PLANTER: A woodland in becoming and an ancient yew grove on the border of North Wales and England

RITUAL WEAVER: Willow coffin making in Cornwall

WOODLORE GATHERER: Science among the trees at Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire

HEARTWOOD CARVER: Among the bodgers in a field outside Cambridge

SHIP BUILDER: A woodland community in the heart of Glasgow's former docklands

LAND SHAPER: Re-wilding the Scottish Highlands

WISH BEARER: The clootie well at Munlochy on The Black Isle, Scottish Highlands, a family tree on Bodmin Moor, Cornwall, and the tree at Sycamore Gap, Northumbria

FOREST BATHER: Swimming at Swallowship Pool, Devil's Water, and Letah Woods Northumberland

MYTH WALKER: Walks in the fictional woods at Wenlock Edge, Shropshire

WAY FOLLOWER: Traditional carpentry in Hida Province, Japan

FIRE LIGHTER: The stories we find among the flames and embers, Ireland

SOUND CREATOR: Guitar-building in North Wales

OAK GALL ILLUSTRATOR: Art in the woodlands of Hampshire

TREE WAILER: Wassailing in Cornwall