Go on a course: blacksmithing

Get to grips with a hammer and an anvil. By Louise Elliott

With eight fires smoking furiously away, the heat was on from the moment I stepped into the blacksmith's forge at West Dean College. 'The first thing is to learn to work your fire at all times,' course tutor Andrew Smith instructed. 'Heap the coke into mountains and use the fan to regulate the temperature.'

 

As the smoke cleared, we watched in awe as he quickly demonstrated how to shape a piece of steel into a pointed taper and, all too soon for me, it was our turn to have a go. I placed a length of steel inside the flames and stoked the coals around it. 'You need to heat the metal until it's yellow-hot, when it will be perfectly malleable, but if you let it become white-hot, sparks will fly and it will break,' Andrew warned.

 

Nervously, I transferred the glowing piece of steel onto the anvil and delivered a series of rather weedy, haphazard blows with my hammer. 'Lift the hammer higher and hit it harder,' he advised. Easier said than done, I thought, but amazingly I slowly began to achieve some kind of rhythm, although my first effort was more flattened than tapered. Our next task was to create a series of curves, which required deft use of the anvil - again beyond my amateurish grasp. But, although I felt frustrated, I started to enjoy the noise of hammer on anvil that echoed throughout the forge and became immersed in every task we were given.

 

It wasn't until the afternoon, however, that I began to make a breakthrough. I was working my fire; I was pulling the metal from the flames with a relaxed nonchalance; I was even using the hammer the right way round. I was en route to producing my pièce de résistance of the day - curving a tip of metal into a shape that came somewhere close to a circle, and producing what I can only describe as a crook. By the end of day, my face streaked with sweat and grime, I felt I had made some progress - and my crook is now being used as an unusual (and, I like to think, rather artistic) plant support.

 

Further information: the Experiencing the Blacksmith's Craft course is held at West Dean College, West Dean, Chichester, West Sussex (01243 818314; www.westdean.org.uk)

 

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