Woodcraft day course in the Cotswolds, England
How this holiday makes a difference
Environment
Using green instead of seasoned timber allows the craftsman to cut and shape the chair components with simple hand tools and rudimentary devices such as a pole-lathe. The process is wholly man-powered. We use fire to produce heat for drying timber, generating steam for bending wood and making the tea. No connection to the national grid!
One of the principles of the green woodwork process is that the conversion of timber is the most efficient it could ever be as it is under the control of the craftsman. His choices and skill get the best out of each tree. The shavings and off-cuts left on the woodland floor after making a chair can themselves be used as fire lighting material or fuel for the fire. Nothing is wasted.
Community
Our business gives employment to tutors and apprentices through the training of others. Our students experience what as woodworkers we do and the natural environment in which we do it. They gain knowledge and learn new skills that are transferable to other aspects of their lives. Some students are inspired to take up green woodwork as a hobby and a few take it up as way of earning a living.
Landscape
The venue for all our courses is the Monastery Garden Woodland Workshop at Prinknash Abbey, near Painswick. Our hosts, the Benedictine Monastic Order of Monks, have been generous in allowing us to set up the workshop under the canopy of a large sycamore tree at the back of the 400-year-old walled garden.
As our inspiration and pleasure comes from working in the woodland it is vital that we are able co-exist with all users of the woodland, namely the members of the public, the Abbey community and nature itself. We maintain the public footpaths through the site and gently push nature back to the perimeter of the workshop. When the courses are finished for the year we dismantle the workshop, put the equipment into storage and the space is returned to nature. In early spring we set it all back up again ready for courses to start again in April.
Prinknash Abbey lies on the edge of the Cotswold Commons and Beechwoods National Nature Reserve is an internationally important area which includes some of Britain's finest beechwoods and limestone grasslands.
The woodlands have a long history of management for timber and are dominated by beech with some ash, pedunculate oak and sycamore. Other tree species include wych elm, field maple, whitebeam, holly and yew.
The Cotswold Way is a long distance footpath that passes Prinknash Abbey Estate and follows the escarpment of the Cotswold hills giving panoramic views across the Severn Vale, passing through beech woods and open pasture with dry stone walls, picturesque villages with limestone cottages.
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