Our tutors regularly encourage us to be discerning and exacting in our timber selection, but last week we found out what finding a unique piece of timber really means.
With furniture maker
Hamish Low and his team of helpers, we helped dig out, mill and transport a 44-ft long, 5,000 year old, semi-fossilized log of
bog oak - a historic find which is intended to make a suitably historic piece of furniture celebrating the heritage of Britain's ancient oak forests.
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| The trunk in the ground |
On a lovely sunny morning, we all trooped up to the field in Norfolk where the log was found by a local landowner earlier this year. The log was an impressive sight in the ground - 44 ft long and weighing an estimated 5 tonnes.
But even more significant than it's sheer size was the quality of the timber. In 20 years' working with bog oak, Hamish said he had never seen a log like it - with virtually no taper in its whole length, he estimated that it must have come from the middle of a tree originally 120-150ft tall. Even more importantly, the timber had virtually no rot in it, and was almost completely free of knots and shakes.
It was the quality and therefore usability of the timber that had really excited Hamish when it was first found. His vision is to make a table using the boards in their whole length to preserve the scale and beauty of the original trunk.
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| Milling up on the mobile saw |
It was this enthusiasm that not only convinced the college to offer to help mill and dry the timber, and to volunteer us (!) to be involved in making the resulting, but also convinced several firms to donate their time and equipment to get the actual log out of the ground, mill it up and get it to the college. Machinery to lift it out of the ground and onto the mill came from local firm
ACF Telehandlers. To saw the planks,
Logosol sent a Northwood mobile saw all the way from Canada (because there was nothing large enough to do the job in the UK!), which was operated by a team from
In Situ Designs. Finally,
Malco Frieght gave the use of an articulated lorry to transport the resulting boards.
Once the boards were cut, we all had to lift each on onto the lorry on bearers to support its whole length as it was moved. Despite their size, the boards were pretty fragile and flexible - as one might expect after millennia buried in wet peat. Hamish has calculated that the timber will lose 3.2-4.2 gallons of water per cubic foot during drying at the humidity-controlled kiln being built at the college.
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| Medullary rays after 5,000 years in the ground | |
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So for the next seven months or so, Hamish and our resident maker
Steve Cook will nurse the boards through the crucial drying process, and hopefully we will be able to report the details of the next stage next year - milling the timber to finished size and making the resulting table. All in all, a very exciting project for us to be involved in.
A BBC report on the day is
here, and loads more pictures and information are on the
Fenland Black Oak Project website.
