Craftland: In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades.

James Fox. Craftland: In Search of Lost Arts and Disappearing Trades. New York: Crown, 2025. Pp 360. Endnotes, hand-drawn images. Cloth, $30.

James Fox’s Craftland is a gorgeous book, and not just because of its wonderful handmade illustrations.  It is filled with beautiful and passionate writing about the people he got to know while researching a book about the few men and women in the United Kingdom who still practice the trades that all people once relied upon for every piece of their material culture.  Before industrialization, every artifact that people used to sustain their lives, from walls and roofs to furniture and baskets, from spoked wheels and fishing gear to barrels and scissors, was made by someone’s skilled hands.  Two hundred years ago, thousands of people in the UK still plied those trades; now precious few still do.

Craftland will be of interest to people who care for Creation because, among the skills maintained by the people Fox writes about are the skills of nurturing ecosystems that supplied them with the raw materials on which their trades were based.  Fox writes about this facet of the trades his subjects practice not simply in passing but more importantly because the knowledge and understanding those tradespeople possess will be ever more important as our industrial and post-industrial societies wreak havoc with the environment, putting our collective survival at risk.

The trades that people once practiced gave families their livelihoods.  They also gave our language many of its turns of phrase, like “hemmed in,” “line our pockets,” “dyed in the wool,” or “put a sock in it.”   The trades gave some communities, which specialized because of a distinctive resource, their identities.  The trades gave many people their last names, like Smith, Wright, Mason, or Taylor.  Although Fox titles his book Craftland, he is careful to distinguish the crafts he describes from the way we use the term today to name a skill that many of us develop to make things in our spare time and for our enjoyment.  The crafts Fox has researched were central to people’s lives.  Their communities depended on those crafts, as did the entire structure of society.

Craftland is divided into three sections – Landscape, Community, and Industry – with four chapters per section.  The first chapter is about wallers, skilled tradespeople who built dry stone masonry walls, i.e., stone walls without mortar.  People on Britain have been building walls of stone for 6,000 years to keep some animals in and to keep other animals out.  When the population was small, the areas enclosed by walls were also small, but from about 1600 onward, Acts of Parliament took ever more land out of the public domain and put it in the hands of the upper classes who had stone walls built to keep the peasants out.  This transition in British history created skilled jobs for thousands of wallers and created much of the landscape by which the island is now known.  Most wallers today earn their livings repairing walls that are hundreds of years old.

In researching his book, Fox got to know Bert and Lydia Noble, brother and sister who learned the wall-building trade from their father.  “They briefly considered other careers but were ultimately drawn back, like homing pigeons, to the craft of their predecessors.” (p 33)  They travel all over the world to use their skill, but most of their work is in Yorkshire.  They have gotten to know the walls they repair so well that they can identify many nameless wallers by their distinctive technique.  “They’ve been known to shed tears of admiration in front of a well-built wall.” (p 34)

Now that agricultural methods have changed, many farmers are getting rid of their walls, and others cannot afford to hire the skills of people like the Nobles, so walls are gradually disappearing from parts of Britain.  Fox points out that more than a picturesque landscape is lost in the process.  Each wall has multiple microclimates that shelter different species of plants and animals.  When walls disappear, their occupants become homeless.  He continues:

If dry stone walls could talk, what would they say?  They would tell us about the geological forces the sculpted our country, the farmers who worked its lands, and the livestock that grazed its surfaces.  They would speak of the dramatic social changes they witnessed and helped produce.  Above all, they would remind us of the forgotten people who built them, and the remarkable trade they practiced.  Dry stone walling is perhaps the most fundamental of all crafts.  It is motivated by an old and profound human urge to impose ourselves on the landscape, to bend it to our will, to leave a mark that lasts.  It has barely changed in 6,000 years and probably never will.  Because in the end, no machine, no artificial intelligence, can improve on a practice so elemental: a person in a landscape, placing one stone on top of another. (p 43)

Fox’s next chapter is about crofters, who are skilled at making thatched roofs, the raw materials of which change with suitable plants that grow in different ecosystems of the island.  The third chapter is about skilled people who tended the forests and made wood products.  One skill is coppicing, practiced by woodsmen who cut select species of trees and then manage the shoots that spring from the roots of a tree stump.  Coppiced shoots of trees can then be harvested at various ages to make broom handles, tool handles, walking sticks, and fences.  The cycle of cutting a mature tree, managing the copse, and eventually allowing a pole to grow to a mature tree again helps the forest move through a cycle of dense overstory to open clearing, allowing successions of plants and animals on the forest floor.

Another group of skilled tradesmen who worked in the woods in winter arre bodgers, who cut trees into logs and then into billets that they can place on a lathe to make spindles for furniture.  Unlike turners, who work at their lathes in a workshop in town, bodgers build a temporary winter shelter in the woods.  A bodger’s portable lathe is powered by a foot treadle and an overhead springy pole.  Each week, a bodger carries his output of spindles into town and sells them to furniture manufacturers, who hire a different array of skilled tradesmen to make the various other parts of a piece of furniture and assemble them into finished articles.

At the end of the chapter, Fox puts what he calls “woodland crafts” in the context of both E.F. Schumacher’s influential 1970s book, Small is Beautiful, and today’s environmental crises.  He brings together the growing number of enthusiasts for woodworking crafts with the people who retain the generations-old skills of the trades to point toward ways we can help forests survive climate change and worsening biodiversity.  “The dying trades of the woods will have to be reborn, not as quaint pastimes, but as professions of genuine national importance.  As we transition to a green economy, woodsmen and women may prove as essential as wind turbine engineers and solar panel fitters, heat pump technicians, and electric vehicle machinists: an old trade joining the new to help craft the future.” (p 93)

Several of the crafts Fox describes involve no solitary tradespeople but groups working together, each with separate sets of skills.  One such is the trade of making bronze bells, which were once about the only human-made sound that could be heard throughout a community.  Church bells rang for worship services, weddings, and funerals.  Civic bells sounded alarms or called citizen gatherings.  Bells announced the time.  Now, bells in our midst are lost in all the other loud noises of modernity.  The chapter begins with Fox describing the scene of molten bronze being poured into a mold to make a cast bell destined to be hung in a church, and he quotes the prayer offered by a vicar in the balcony of the workshop as the casting is about to begin.  Fox visited the foundry of John Taylor and Company, which goes back to the 1300s and took the name Taylor in the 1700s.  The company was at its peak in the late 1800s.  It still makes bells for customers around the world.  Its workers’ skills include making the sand molds, heating the alloy of copper and tin to the right temperature, and tuning a cast bell by carefully removing small amounts of bronze from the inside of the bell at just the right locations to achieve the required tone.  Taylor’s tuner is a devote Hindu.

Each chapter introduces the reader to one or more fascinating individuals who still practice one of those old trades, ranging from Felicity Irons, who earns her living by harvesting bullrush and making beautiful baskets and other articles (check out her website: www.rushmatters.co.uk), to wheelwrights, from watchmakers to the skilled artisans who still make high-quality scissors by hand.  Each of these tradespeople deploys a remarkable array of skills, and their insights into what is required to perform quality work are invaluable in this age when we rely on machines to do so much of the work for us.

Craftland ends with Fox visiting a group of quilters who have gathered together monthly for decades to quilt.  The numbers of such groups are growing in the UK, as participants build community while making quilts for loved ones and for people in need.  He calls quilting a “craft of love.” (p 313)  It brings relaxation to members quilting groups.  He asks practitioners of the trades if they find their craft relaxing.  Felicity Irons responds, “Of course it isn’t!” (p 314), referring to the fact that she does her work out of conviction, not as a pastime.  Fox lifts up both groups for the ways their crafts bring them closer to their physical world, something we all need in our increasingly digital world.  Crafts serve a greater purpose than reminding us of the past.  They answer our needs and help us solve problems.  “As we lurch through an era of political volatility, economic inequality, and climate catastrophe, they suddenly feel rather relevant.”

Fredric L. Quivik