Tanning Holiday (not that kind!!!)

So we (me, Emma, Jasper and Wren) booked our buspersons holiday back in February.  I’ve been wanting to partake in a bark tanning camp for years with Oak and Smoke Tannery.  Jessie and Jane who run it have been tanning 10 years plus and have many mural friends and teachers in the tanning / ancestral skills world (it’s not a big community of tanner’s ,but growing).

This was the first long course of bark tanning fur on and off course.  They usually do a one and two day course alongside / included in their buckskin camps.  So I was well chuffed that they were running a 5 day camp.

Considering bark tanning leather is on the critical to be exctinict of crafts in the UK it was refreshing that two leading tanner’s were willing to organics and share this alchmeic art.

Bark tanning is often misunderstood with very little information available. Which is strange as most towns and villages had tanneries and these were closely linked into the green wood workers / foresters for their bark ,mainly oak.

Also living on a damp island, bark tanned, grain on ( the shiny outside of the leather ) leather lends itself well to being waterproof, mould and insect resistant.  What’s not to like ?. Other than learning how to process the bark to boil and extract there is the process of soaking skins and the part prior to that of de haring them to make leather.

We also learnt and transformed a salted dirty raw sheep skin fleece into a lovely bark scrubbed useable fleece.  

The process respecting and giving honour to the wild rabbit and using the skin after the skinning , to butchering and eating all the rabbit. To then creating a fur on bark tanned leather was my first time, as I usually don’t work with wild rabbits as the skin is so thin that it tends to rip easily and you are often left with a stringy mess.  But the techniques taught soon showed with more patience and finesse that wild rabbits skinned can be turned into lush useable preserved natural organic fur.

The other part of the course which always seems to fascinate people is the Fish skin leather.  This is a ancient ancestral craft which was often only done by windowed indigenous people as they lost their partner who were the hunter so getting access to bigger skins was more challenging??.  

The scraping and de-scaling of the haddock and salmon is always satisfying and then seeing them transform over the days in bark solution to then finally having a bit of oil being put back in to the skin then drying and softening and watching this slimly material transform Into useable leather is magical.

We were also shown the process at different at different stages of deer and sheep skin bark tanning.

Along with all the tanning we even made a small leather pouch and were shown simple sewing techniques to create our very own bark tanned deer or reindeer leather item.

Even the children sewed leather and made great pouches mostly by themselves.

All this was happening in the natural setting of a camp that blended in to the Dartmoor national park with no traffic or unnatural disturbance.

And to top all this off we were fed so well by Katy and this is what kept us in great spirits, also the we had no rain which is a blessing in August in the UK on a hide tanning camp relying on off grid technology such as fire ,sun and wind. 

It was a pleasure to be with 17 or so ancestral crafter’s of all ages and backgrounds with loads of enthusiasm.

Thanks to all the Oak and Smoke Tannery crew and it’s soo inspirational to see two dedicated crafters working extremely hard through their passion and making somewhat of a living from this ancestral skill and sharing this vital knowledge.