Tim Willey

Perhaps an odd sounding title, but I had a very pleasant evening talking to the Southrepps Society about material ecology and the development of a productive coppice ecosystem. The star of the show was the splint basket which, in conjunction with the newly established coppice, I used as a case study. This is the MkII splint basket, and I've used 'riven'  splints  (split and shaved) rather than sawn timber.  Is this a more  authentic technology? I'm not certain, but I would have thought that reliance on saw-milled timber for the splints would be a late nineteenth century development.  And nothing wrong with that!  The original Jack Rowsell basket which I have in my collection uses sawn timber splints and it's a beautiful example of the species!   In this case however, I thought that the simple, in-situ, process of splitting coppice poles with a froe, would be more sympathetic to the coppice cycle.  So with the aid of forty-plus images (leading...