The Sleán– a turf cutting spade
We were in Ireland, the weather had been atrocious and a fierce and painful throat bug had been running round the field hitting quite a few of the craft workers. We were all struggling.
He arrived on Sunday afternoon in the pouring rain and asked to do a workshop. I croaked at him that I’d finished for the weekend because my throat was so sore – it hurt to talk and standing over the dusty charcoal fire wasn’t going to help. He completely understood, but wanted to give me the barter he’d prepared for me anyway. It was little pottery bowl that he’d painted with one of the potters, featuring an anvil and hammers, surrounded by flames.
I caved in – I couldn’t turn him down after that, could I? But we’d have to do it with the minimum of the spoken word from me. Before we lit the fire, we went through the safety warnings and what we were going to achieve. We were making a hook and on this occasion I’d make one and he’d follow my actions, making his.
We worked companionably for a while and as he settled in, he started to talk about himself and why he’d particularly wanted to have a go at smithing. It turned out that his great-grandfather had been a blacksmith – he’d never met him as he’d died before his great-grandson was born but there was still a pattern of sleán, the turf-cutting spade ubiquitous in rural areas, that bears his name to this day. Smithing with me, he felt he was touching base with an ancestor he’d never known but was really proud of.
He left having reached down through the years to connect with something elemental and primal and it struck me that if I’d been accepting cash for my workshops, because I’d been feeling so rough I’d have turned him away and never heard that beautiful story or enabled him to have that great experience. And as for his little bowl, it sits beside my woodburner at home, holding matches for the fire.
Kate The Wordsmith 