GROW, GROW the GROW BOAT
From their Cotswolds smallholding, Ann and Simon Cooper grow flax for currachs, coracles and canoes. Can they spark a revival for Britain’s long-lost crop?
It’s a late summer’s evening and Ann Cooper is pulling flax from the field. “I find it relaxing,” she says, as she grabs the base of the plant and heaves. “There’s really nothing better.” Ann then lays the strands, each more than a metre long, on the ground in a row, heads at one end, roots at the other, and allows them to rot – or “ret” in flax parlance – for a couple of weeks. Flax growing involves a lot of stages.
Ann and Simon Cooper grow flax on a half-acre patch of land in the Cotswolds, where Simon used to work full-time as a farmer. The couple started Flaxland, championing fibre flax and teaching others how to use it, in 2008. They had been growing the crop for a couple of years because they were building a currach, a small round boat, and had been looking for a strong fabric to cover the frame. Simon had made the structure from larch and ash from the farm. They thought of flax, because they were already producing it. “We liked the idea of growing our own boat,” Simon says in his broad West Country accent.
The couple first imported fibre flax seed from France, where much of the world’s flax is grown, and sowed it one spring. As it grew, they learnt as much as they could about the crop from old books from ebay. Harvesting the flax, from mid-august to mid-september, would be the easy part. After the retting, when the wind and the rain weathers the strands so that the bark begins to flake, the flax has to be rippled, when the seed heads are removed by drawing the strands through a wide-tooth comb. Then comes the breaking, when the grower cracks the stems so that the bark falls off; the scutching, when they beat the fibre to remove any remaining bark and polish it; and the hackling, when they comb it with increasingly finer combs for the finished fibre. Finally, the grower might want to spin it.
With Simon’s farming background and Ann’s methodical nature (she used to work in accounts), they quickly got the hang of the stages. But before they made fabric for their currach, where strength really mattered, they thought they should test their yarn on smaller projects. They wove wraps and scarves on a small loom and Ann knitted with it – when they spun it loosely, it was really soft. Simon and Ann realised that it might have wider appeal.
DREAM WEAVERS
The couple had been intrigued by flax for years. They knew that fibre flax had been grown in the UK since the Bronze Age, its strands being spun and woven into linen cloth. Every May and June, its lilac flowers would have covered the countryside. Then the Industrial Revolution arrived, and cotton, from the US, took over. Cotton was easier to spin and dye, and was cheaper. By the 1950s, commercial flax growing in the UK had died out.
Now the Coopers had started growing flax, they didn’t want to stop. “We thought we were going to produce these lengths of fibre and that hundreds of spinners would come knocking at our door,” Simon says. “We soon learnt that most spinners buy ‘flax tops’, which come from a factory. That flax has been processed and is
“We didn’t expect to end up spinning and weaving all this flax. We just had to do something with it!”
very fine.” It was unlike the Coopers’ long-line fibre, which was muddied with straw. “Ours didn’t have the same appeal. We didn’t expect to end up spinning, weaving… doing all of this,” he says, looking around the workshop. “We just had to do something with it!”
Simon set to work making the tools the couple would need. “It would have been impossible to have done this without making them,” he says. “The flax industry has been gone for so long [in the UK] that there’s almost nothing left. We tried all sorts of routes.” Even today, making tools or adapting them takes up much of Simon’s time, but it also means he can supply other makers and promote flax that way. He has taught himself how to carve hackling combs and scutching knives, rippling blocks and drop spindles, and is working on motorising some to make the process more efficient.
NEW LIFE FOR OLD THREADS
Flaxland workshops, covering how to grow and process flax, attract anyone with an interest in rural crafts as well as students from the Royal College of Art. The couple also take displays across the country. This year, they provided flax for the Waterways exhibit at Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival.
What the Coopers hadn’t predicted at the start was that their flax would be in demand from diverse fields. Universities and research bodies often ask for whole batches. “There’s a lot of research into using flax to replace glass fibre,” Simon says. “It’s really exciting.” Flax with a polyester resin is already used in the dashboards of cars instead of plastic. Manufacturers are also looking at whether the bonnet could be made from composite materials using it, and whether they could weave in solar panels using flax fibre.
Simon and Ann did finish their currach and still have it. They’ve since made other flax-covered boats, from coracles to canoes, including one used by a friend to travel from Edinburgh to Exmouth for charity. It survived more than 150 miles of paddling and 500 miles of being towed behind a bike. The Coopers have a video of the highlights. “It almost makes me cry every time I see it,” Ann says. She remembers reading the canoeist’s reports on the way, when he said he had about 60 litres of water in the back of the boat. “I told Simon and he said, ‘I don’t want to know!’” The canoe, however, made it back and the trip was considered a triumph.
Simon is now restoring a Windermere skiff, a rowing boat once common in the Lake District. The couple will display this alongside engravings by Turner, who often featured boats in his work, at the Festival de Loire in Orléans this September. “You run into flax again,” Simon says. “Not only is the boat made of flax, but Turner’s canvas would have been made of it and his oils would have used linseed (the golden seeds of the flax plant). It all ties in!”
Ann and Simon realise that not everyone has ambitions to build a fabric-covered boat – they use their canoe on a local canal to pop down to the brewery – but they would like us all to appreciate flax in some form. On their website, they sell popular growing kits. “You don’t need much space,” Ann says, “and it’s so pretty. You can process it or let it dry and make it into a display.” That heaving at the start, remember, is relaxing.
“You don’t need much space to grow it – and it’s so pretty”