To have and to hold

Finding himself at a loose end, woodsman John Williamson decided to revive the lost art of Devon stave-basket-making using old museum transcripts.

- Natasha Goodfellow

IT was the supermarkets that did for stave baskets,’ says maker and forester John Williamson from his open-sided barn high above the Teign Valley, on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon. Not because they started selling cheaper plastic versions, but ‘because the potato pickers used to pinch their wire baskets to use instead’. This little nugget —gleaned from one of Mr Williamson’s customers, herself a former farmworker—is one of the fascinating pieces of social history that he has unearthed in his quest to revive the making of these beautiful wooden baskets.

The son of a woodsman, Mr Williamson grew up in Devon and has a keen appreciation for rural crafts and traditions, but he never set out to make baskets. After studying product design at university in Exeter, he looked for work locally, but the options were limited. ‘There’s really only farming, which barely employs anyone anymore, or pub work around here—but we do have the woodlands,’ he reflects. Many owners of native broadleaf woodlands consider them unviable, but Mr Williamson begs to differ. ‘They don’t know what they’ve got.’

Indeed, he has made his living entirely from the woods, managing them both for others and, since 2016, when he was able to buy 10 acres of ancient semi-natural woodland of his own, for himself. As elsewhere in the UK, his woods hadn’t been managed for some 50 to 60 years; he is now regenerating them in order to coppice them for charcoal, as well as coppicing the oak for cleft gates, the birch for besom brooms and the hazel for hurdles.