Cleft hazel hurdle, finished in a long afternoon
A first attempt at the traditional Sussex hurdle, learned from a YouTube apprenticeship
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I started cleaving hazel hurdles last summer after watching a single afternoon’s demonstration at the Heritage Crafts gathering at Burwash. The hurdle below is my eleventh, and the first I would actually use. The earlier ten are stacked in the workshop in increasing order of how much they would embarrass me if a hurdle-maker walked past.
The cleft is the part most beginners get wrong. You want the hazel to split along its length so the two halves carry the same flex; force it past the natural fibre and one half goes brittle, the other goes too soft. The trick I learned, badly, by doing it badly seven times, is to listen for the sound the rod makes as it splits. A clean cleft sounds like a single short rip; a forced one sounds like a low groan.
The afternoon below is from the first weekend in May, behind the workshop. Light was good. The willow was reluctant.
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