From ‘Tree to Sea’ with Damian Goodburn

On the 29th and 30th of April we had the pleasure of hosting Damian Goodburn for a two day workshop about identifying and working with timber ready to be used in ship and boat building so that our volunteers will be skilled up on the techniques that we believe where used on the original Anglo-Saxon ship.

This video shows the hard work required to change an length of oak into a usable plank. This one piece of wood was worked on by several men over the two days but was only partly finished at the end of it.

Training continues tin May with a trip to the Viking Museum at Roskilde in Denmark, whose craftsmen are also world leaders in restoring and recreating ancient wooden clinker built boats

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The selection of photographs below show the different aspects of the two days. One lesson learned is that turning a tree into a plank is a slow and back breaking process but interesetly no one wanted to down tools so it is clearly a dormant skill that we are happy to bring back to life.