Slios Bruguaine

Parchment: Medieval Availability & Use Deerskin parchment, with a duck feather quill pen. In the medieval period, scribes across Europe relied upon animal skin for their painting/writing/book-making medium. Paper existed (such as papyrus, in northern Africa, hemp and mulberry paper in Asia) but in the colder, wetter climate of northern Europe, animal skin was comparatively abundant, affordable, more durable and easier to make. Skins were a constant natural byproduct of butchering livestock for meat. Flat, stretched rawhide, called parchment or vellum (depending on thinness & quality), could be written upon with char pencil, chalk, ink or paint; it could be dyed special colors and cut into useful shapes (rectangles, hearts, etc), and it would last for centuries, so long as it was kept dry. It was also far more reusable than papyrus. Cow, goat, sheep and deer skin could all be made into parchment without too much labor investment, and the skin from the young animals (cal...

Correcting the Celtic Myth in Ireland A mythos surrounding the culture of a people called Celts has dominated studies of the Irish for more than a century.  'Celtic' began as a linguistic term and may still accurately be used to describe, linguistically, the Irish language.  Over time, however, Celtic came to associate the native population in Ireland with a Continental culture that migrated across Europe during the Greek and Roman Classical period, called the Celts. The Celts immigrated through northern Europe and across the Channel into England; the genetic analysis of Central and Eastern England shows significant Continental ingression compared to the rest of the British Isles  (1) .  Many people therefore assume today that the Celts must also have conquered Ireland, and that the modern Irish are ethnically descendants of the Celts.  This notion emerged in the nineteenth century, in large part due to coincidental similarities between Irish art and...

Charring Wood as a Preservative Treatment To read about what charcoal is, see  The History of Charcoal . To read about the mound method of producing charcoal, see  Charcoal Clamps , and to read about the underground method, see  Pit Kilns . To read about other uses for charcoal, see Micro-Charring .  Char chemically changes wood, making it more resistant to rot, insects and fire damage, and can be done easily at home without specialized equipment. Background In temperate regions, wood posts are likely to rot, particularly at the line where they protrude from the ground. The denser the wood, the slower the rot (which is why locust wood makes good fence posts), and certain species of tree can contain chemicals that fight mold and insect damage, but here in the mid-Atlantic region of the US, these are not enough. Even cedar posts rarely last longer than 20 years without treatment. Locust posts frequently survive 10 years, and other hardwood species last...

Micro-Charring for Pigment, Tinder or Medicine To read about what charcoal is, see The History of Charcoal . To read about the mound method of producing charcoal, see Charcoal Clamps , and to read about the underground method, see Pit Kilns . To read about preserving wood, see Charring Fence Posts . Apart from its use as a fuel for smelting, smithing and domestic heating, charcoal has a long history of use as pigment, tinder and medicine. Pigment Charcoal is a black substance that does not decay; it is completely light-fast (will not fade when exposed to sunlight) and chemically stable (it will not oxidize or change color over time). This makes it very useful in artwork and for writing. The oldest use of charcoal outside of a hearth was as pigment for drawing and painting on cave walls, more than 30,000 years ago. Sketching with charcoal sticks remained popular throughout human history and continues today. Painting with finely ground charcoal developed into a specialized ar...

Charcoal Pits To read about what charcoal is, see The History of Charcoal . To read about the mound method of producing charcoal, see CharcoalClamps . To read about the crucible method of producing charcoal, see Micro-Charring .  To read about wood preservation, see Charring Fence Posts . Creating charcoal begins with preparing a burn site. With the mound method, this means scraping clean a level, above-ground surface, cleared to prevent the spread of fire. This can include building earthwork sides or half-walls to reduce the labor of enclosing the burn pile. However, a safer and more certain method is to dig a trench or pit hearth, and to conduct the charcoal burn below grade. Burning within a sheltering bank of earth provides two major benefits, compared with open mounds: 1) It reduces the dirt-shoveling labor involved in repeated burns, so long as the same site is used each time. Rather than having to cover an entire mound with dirt every time a charcoal mound is fired...

Charcoal Clamps: The Mound Method To read about what charcoal is, see The History of Charcoal . Site prep Charcoal production begins with preparing a burn site. This may be a trench or a pit, but it can also be a cleared above-ground surface at a safe distance from flammable materials. The charcoal burner had to scrape the flat site of all vegetable matter, including surface roots, which could spread the fire from the burn. Later techniques for this included using draft animals and a scraper blade to drag the area clean; in the Appalachian Mountains, colliers chose saddles between ridges and clear-cut, pulled out stumps, then scraped with a road blade to create the round, flat, clear spaces for their charcoal burns (and many of these clearings, with fire-road access, still serve as convenient camping spots today). Details on their method can be found in the Foxfire series, Vol. 5. For the mound method, it was imperative that the burn site be stable and completely level. If the...

What is charcoal? Charcoal is a natural wood derivative left behind after wildfires, structure fires or campfires. Humans learned early on to create charcoal deliberately as a superior fuel source that was concentrated, light, and clean to transport, and that made hotter, smokeless fires. To create charcoal, dry wood has to be slowly carbonized to remove any moisture and many impurities. Hardwood converts more efficiently into charcoal than softwood (the denser, the better) and it must be seasoned (air-dried) for 6+ months in most climates before the charcoal burn, or else the moisture present in the wood will cause wasteful fuel loss during the burn. Ideally, oak wood that was cut in freezing weather (when the sap is underground) and dried until summer would make the best charcoal—although, other dense woods such as holly and birch were also used extensively in Europe, and any organic matter can be converted to charcoal under the right conditions. Making the dry wood into charc...

The History and Sustainability of Coppicing  Part 4: Hedges  To read about other forms of coppicing, see Coppicing: Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 . Definition Hedges are lines of closely planted trees that form a barrier by growing together thickly. Fedges are living fences of trees, planted closely like a hedge, but carefully pruned to keep the trunks open and visible (the trunks are often woven in some aesthetically pleasing pattern). Hedges frequently reach 6' thick, and are allowed to grow with minimal edge-pruning for years at a time between pleachings. Fedges must be pruned yearly and only their tops become brushy and thick. History Hedges are as old as pasture divisions, and remain in use today. In WW2, hedge-rows in Europe were so old, well-rooted and impenetrable that they were able to stop tanks, and had to be blasted out of the way for machinery to get through. Unlike stone walls and wattle fences, hedges become stronger and better at containing livestock...