A Registered Charity 1175475 reconstructing the Sutton Hoo Ship
Well first, let’s make it clear what an auger isn’t. It’s all down to the critical vowel. In ancient Rome, we know of course that an augur was a religious official whose task was to predict divine approval or disapproval of a proposed course of action by interpreting phenomena. So, a spoon auger is not…
There is always a slight mix of both excitement and apprehension when I am asked to forge a new style of axe, so when David Pryor, of the ship’s company, emailed me out of the blue this was especially true. Not only have I had a fascination with all things ‘Viking’ since a very young…
The Anglo Saxon ship that was buried at Sutton Hoo was of course made out of wood, a widely available, buoyant, and relatively easily worked substance that was the material of choice for ship-building from the earliest times right up until the beginning of the nineteenth century when traditional wooden hulls were gradually replaced with…
We were introduced to working with a Holly Mallet by Damian Goodburn some time ago and have been using them ever since. A holly mallet is made from the natural branch growth of a holly tree. When making a Holly mallet the tree is chosen because of the way it grows. The thing to look…
This is the first experiment in carving Anglo-Saxon artwork in green oak, as potential decoration for our reconstruction of the Sutton Hoo Ship. Known as Style II, or specifically, late Style II, this style of Anglo-Saxon art dates to the first decades of the 7th century; around the same time as the Sutton Hoo Ship…