The Willow Weaver
The Somerset Levels Were Built on Willow, and the Weavers Who Work It Are Keeping Both Alive
The Somerset Levels are the flattest place in England. Standing on the raised bank of the River Parrett near Stoke St Gregory, you can see for miles in every direction - a horizontal world of reed beds, drainage ditches, flooded meadows, and the geometric rows of pollarded willows that line every rhyne and drove. In winter, when the floods come, the Levels become a shallow inland sea and the willow beds stand knee-deep in brown water. In summer, the willows are a dense green wall. In spring, just after the harvest, the beds are stubble fields of pale stumps, each one bristling with the promise of next year’s crop. This is withy country. It has been withy country for at least six hundred years.
A withy is a willow rod. The word is Old English, and in Somerset it has never gone out of use. The withies grown on the Levels are not wild willows. They are cultivated varieties of Salix, planted in managed beds, harvested annually, and processed into the raw material for basket-making and a hundred other woven products. The industry that grew up around them was once one of the largest rural employers in Somerset. Today it survives in the hands of a small number of growers and weavers who maintain a craft and a landscape that are inseparable from each other.
The Withy Beds
Willow growing on the Somerset Levels is not farming in any conventional sense. The beds - called withy beds or withybeds, one word locally - are planted once and harvested every year for decades. A well-maintained bed can produce a crop annually for thirty or forty years before it needs replanting. The willows are set as cuttings, pushed into the wet ground at close spacing, and left to grow. In their first year they establish roots. From the second year onward, they are cut back to ground level each winter, and every spring they send up a fresh crop of straight, unbranched rods from the stool.
This is coppicing, the same principle used in hazel woods and sweet chestnut plantations across England. But willow coppice on the Levels is uniquely intensive. The beds are dense - thousands of stools per acre - and the crop cycle is annual, not the seven-to-fifteen-year rotation of woodland coppice. The result is a crop that is harvested, processed, and sold every year, on a rhythm as regular as any arable rotation.
The harvest happens in winter, after the leaves have fallen and the sap has dropped. The rods are cut by hand with a hook or, increasingly, by machine. Hand cutting is still preferred by some growers for the highest-quality material, because a clean cut close to the stool promotes healthy regrowth and reduces disease. A machine cut is faster but rougher. The economics push toward the machine. The quality pushes back.
The varieties grown are specific to the purpose. Black Maul produces a strong, thick rod used for heavy baskets and agricultural work. Dicky Meadows gives a fine, straight rod prized for delicate weaving. Flanders Red has a deep crimson bark that is valued for decorative work. Champion Rod lives up to its name. Each variety has a character - flexibility, colour, grain, taper - and the grower knows which bed contains which, and which rod suits which job. This is not generic material. It is a library of specific forms, each one selected and maintained over generations for a particular quality.
The Processing
A freshly cut willow rod is not ready to weave. It must be processed, and the method of processing determines its character and its use. There are three main forms, and understanding them is essential to understanding the craft.
Brown willow is the simplest. The rods are cut, bundled, dried, and stored with their bark on. When needed for weaving, they are soaked in water for days or weeks to make them supple again. Brown willow retains the natural colour of the bark - which ranges from olive green to deep purple to near-black depending on the variety - and has a robust, rustic character. It is the material of agricultural baskets, fencing, garden structures, and heavy-duty work.
White willow is stripped of its bark. The rods are stood upright in shallow water in spring, allowed to sprout leaves, and then pulled through a brake - a simple metal device that strips the bark cleanly from the wood. The result is a pale, smooth rod with a fine grain, slightly ivory in colour, that is the classic material of the English basket trade. White willow is elegant, clean, and associated with the highest-quality work.
Buff willow is produced by boiling the rods for several hours before stripping. The tannin in the bark stains the wood a warm, rich brown - the colour of leather or toffee. Buff willow is prized for its colour and its slightly firmer handle compared to white. It sits between the rustic character of brown and the refinement of white, and good weavers use all three in combination.
The processing infrastructure that once existed on the Levels was substantial. Boiling pits, stripping sheds, drying racks, and storage barns were as much a feature of the landscape as the withy beds themselves. Most of this infrastructure has gone. The handful of growers who remain maintain their own processing facilities, but the scale is a fraction of what it was. The Musgrove Willows yard at Westonzoyland, the Coate family operation near North Curry, and a few others represent the working remnant of what was once an industry.
The Weaving
Basket-making is one of the oldest crafts in the world. Woven containers predate pottery. They predate metalwork. It is possible that they predate settled agriculture. The principle is universal: take flexible rods, interlace them, and produce a container. The execution, in the hands of a skilled weaver, is anything but simple.
A traditional English basket - a round shopping basket, a log basket, a laundry basket - is built from the base up, on a frame of thicker rods called the slath. The base is woven first: the slath rods are arranged in a cross, and thinner rods are woven around them in a spiral, gradually opening the slath out into a flat disc. Once the base is the right diameter, the stake-up begins: thicker rods are inserted alongside the base sticks and bent upward to form the skeleton of the sides. The weaver then works around and around, weaving the side rods through the stakes in one of several patterns - randing, slewing, waling - each producing a different texture, strength, and appearance.
The border - the finished top edge - is the most technically demanding part. The stakes must be bent over and woven back into the body of the basket in a continuous, interlocking pattern that is both structural and decorative. A good border is tight, even, and beautiful. A bad border unravels. The border is where the weaver’s skill shows most clearly, and it is the first thing another weaver looks at when assessing a piece of work.
A skilled weaver can produce a standard round basket in two to three hours. The movements are fast, rhythmic, and precise - the rod selected, the tip threaded through, the butt tucked in, the whole thing tapped tight with a rapping iron as the work progresses. There is a sound to basket-making: the crack of the rod bending, the tap of the iron, the rustle of willow against willow. A workshop full of weavers sounds like a small percussion ensemble.
The Industry That Was
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Somerset willow industry employed thousands. The Levels produced the raw material. The villages around Stoke St Gregory, North Curry, Athelney, and Burrowbridge were the manufacturing centres. Baskets were made for every conceivable purpose: shopping baskets, bread baskets, laundry baskets, fishing creels, eel traps, potato skips, fruit punnets, hampers, coffins, military panniers, shell carriers, pigeon baskets, and bottle cradles. The railways consumed vast quantities of wicker hampers. The fishing industry needed creels and pots. The Post Office used wicker sorting baskets. The demand seemed bottomless.
It was not. Plastic arrived in the 1950s, and within two decades it had destroyed the commercial basket trade almost completely. A plastic container was cheaper, lighter, waterproof, uniform, and available in any quantity. It did not rot, did not need soaking, did not require a seven-year apprenticeship to make. The advantages were overwhelming. By the 1970s, the willow industry on the Levels had collapsed. The withy beds were abandoned or grubbed out. The processing sheds fell into disrepair. The weavers who had supplied a national market found themselves supplying nothing at all.
The acreage of managed withy beds on the Levels fell from over two thousand acres at its peak to fewer than two hundred. The number of full-time basket-makers in England fell from several thousand to a few dozen. The craft did not die, but it came very close. What survived did so in the hands of a small number of people who continued working either because they could not imagine doing anything else or because they understood that what they carried was worth more than its market value.
What Survives
The survival of willow weaving in Somerset is a story of adaptation rather than preservation. The weavers who remain are not making the same products for the same markets. They are making different things for different people, and in doing so they have kept the core of the craft alive while changing almost everything around it.
Some make fine baskets for a high-end market - handcrafted pieces sold through galleries, craft fairs, and direct commissions. A well-made English willow basket, produced by a named maker from Somerset-grown material, commands a significant price and attracts buyers who understand what they are paying for. This is not a mass market. It is a niche, but it is a viable one.
Some make living willow structures - tunnels, domes, screens, and fences made from freshly cut willow rods pushed into the ground, where they root and grow into permanent green architecture. This has become a genuine market, driven by schools, community gardens, and the broader interest in natural materials and sustainable landscaping. A living willow structure is beautiful, functional, and grows more robust every year. It also requires ongoing maintenance, which means ongoing work for the maker.
Some teach. The demand for basket-making courses is stronger than it has been in decades. Weekend workshops, week-long intensives, and longer apprenticeship-style training attract people from across the country and beyond. The appeal is partly practical - people want to make things with their hands - and partly something harder to name. There is a satisfaction in basket-making that is immediate and physical: you start with a bundle of rods and in a few hours you have a container that works. In a world of abstraction and screens, that directness is increasingly rare and increasingly valued.
And some do all of these things, because a willow weaver in 2026 cannot survive by doing only one. The versatility is a strength. But it is also a sign of fragility. A craft that requires its practitioners to be simultaneously grower, processor, maker, teacher, marketer, and small business owner is a craft that places extraordinary demands on the people who carry it. The old industry distributed these roles across dozens of specialists. The new reality concentrates them in a handful of individuals who are, each of them, doing the work of ten.
The Levels and the Willows
The withy beds are not just a crop. They are part of the hydrology of the Levels. The Somerset Levels are a managed wetland - a landscape that would be underwater for most of the year without the network of rhynes, pumping stations, and drainage channels that keep it habitable. The withy beds play a role in this system. They absorb floodwater. Their roots stabilise the soft peat soils. Their annual harvest maintains the beds as open, productive habitat. Without management, the beds would become scrub within a few years, and the particular ecology they support would disappear.
This is the deepest argument for the willow craft: that the craft and the landscape are the same thing. The Levels were shaped by the people who worked them. The rhynes were dug by hand. The withy beds were planted by hand. The peat was cut by hand. Every feature of this landscape is a product of human labour sustained across centuries. When the labour stops, the landscape changes. It does not return to some pristine natural state. It becomes something else - something wilder, perhaps, but also something diminished, because the particular richness of the Levels depends on the particular kind of management that created it.
The willow weavers of Somerset are maintaining a landscape as much as a craft. Every rod they cut, every basket they weave, every bed they replant is an act of stewardship disguised as commerce. The willows need the Levels and the Levels need the willows and both need the people who understand the relationship between them. That understanding is the real endangered thing. The willows will grow regardless. Whether anyone will be there to cut them, process them, and weave them into something useful and beautiful - that is the question that keeps the last growers awake at night, counting rods in the dark.