Hi all,
I haven't posted a bow yet, but I wanted to put up a few photos from one of my hunts for bow wood.
We have some nice native woods here, but I'm always on the lookout for sources of "exotic" wood, like Black Locust etc.
I'm always on the lookout for Yew especially, as it looks amazing as a bow, but aside from churchyards and the front gardens of the courthouse, there isn't much to be found.
I went for a wander the other day up a hill where I have been a hundred times, and decided to take a different track... probably the only track I had never ventured down. I spotted a couple of Yew trees and thought that was pretty cool, but I kept wandering and found there was actually a decent sized patch of Yew trees there amongst the native. There's probably 40 or 50 trees on that hillside. So I saw more Yew trees in 30 seconds that I've seen in nearly 30 years. There's some pretty big ones with some nice straight branches, but most of them are relatively small, and pretty straight too.
I found a few small ones which had been cut down quite some time ago, the bark was rotten and it looks like it had some kind of white fungus or mould growing on it. However, the wood underneath is hard as a rock and looks completely undamaged, so I took them home.
They're a pretty special find around these parts, so I want to make use of the "scrap bits" first if I possibly can. Unfortunately, with the bark having already rotted off, most of the stuff on the ground has undergone pretty serious checking, but I think I can get some bows out of it. There may be enough wood on the ground for half a dozen. Eventually I can get into the live trees and cut some staves from those too.
I went back and took quite a few pictures, in case anyone is interested to see what we have around here. About 50% of the trees in the photos are Yew, the rest is mostly native with a few elms and hawthorn in places.
Thanks for looking
... have to stay sane somehow until I can get some bow pics posted up
