Keeping Heritage Crafts Alive

At Chiltern Open Air Museum you have the opportunity to watch and take part in many heritage craft activities. As you drive here it is easy to forget that the preparations for that journey, the home in which you live, the ordinary things that you use simply did not exist even two or three hundred years ago. It is the heritage crafts that you see here that made our modern life possible and which, after the Industrial Revolution, became unnecessary and an increasingly distant memory.

Many of these traditional crafts would have taken place in our Museum buildings. During your visit, you can often see craftspeople at work, using their skills in the original setting, or heritage objects that were handmade by our Chiltern ancestors.

The Crafts of Our Ancestors

Our most distant ancestors had only wood, stones and eventually flint tools with which to ensure their survival. Gradually more and more skills were added to their repertoire and individuals began to specialise in particular crafts. Over many, many hundreds of years, by the time that Industrialisation began there were blacksmiths, spinners, weavers, papermakers, charcoal burners, stone masons, thatchers, coopers, potters, wood-turners, wheelwrights, rope makers, saddle makers, tanners, basket makers, lace makers, straw plaiters, bodgers and many more.

The Rarest Crafts? Flint Knapping & Bucket Making

Some of the crafts listed above are still quite commonly practised, but flint knapping and bucket making are much rarer. Knapping is the shaping of flint, chert or obsidian and provided the only durable and sharp tools for our earliest ancestors. Flint mines were situated in the South Downs and East Anglia and are found much closer to the surface in many other places. The process of flint knapping is best understood by watching someone doing it and Jonny Cope often visits the Museum to show us how.

It is better to watch a craftsman than to read an explanation. Alan Paulus is believed to be the last traditional bucket maker in the UK. He also demonstrates his skills as a wheelwright & leatherworker when he visits the Museum. Here he shows us how to make a medieval bucket.

Incidentally, whether you call it a bucket or a pail seems to be a matter of personal usage, although some would say that a pail is a bucket with a lid.

Celebrating Heritage Crafts

Items available at our Craft Fairs and also demonstrated around the Museum are reviving traditions which go back to the dawn of our history. Our Heritage Craft weekend is a celebration of these skills, bringing craftspeople together to show our visitors the range of crafts that took place in the Chilterns.