My time with 'Castle Ring Oak Frame'
Looking back at my last placement on the Princes Foundations ‘Building Crafts Programme’….
I mean I don’t know where to begin with this one… Looking back now I really can’t believe how lucky I was to get such a full bodied 3 weeks of experience. In fact, if I was told to draft up an itinerary for my own ‘perfect’ 3 week oak framing placement, then I still don’t think it would be able to compete with what ‘Castle Ring Oak Frame’ delivered.
So who are ‘Castle Ring Oak Frame’?
So let me set the scene… The weather was… well… very Welsh! sporadic rain, wind and the biting cold. It was early February and I had just arrived at the Castlering Wood to meet Rob Dawson (the master framer)
Rob lives and works at the Castlering wood with his family, just outside the peaceful town of Presteigne on the boarders of Wales. The Castlering is such a magical space, a series of ancient Beech trees and an earth mound that circles a huge grassed clearing. The Space is thought to have once been a Neolithic settlement or farmstead but now creates a perfect playground for their wild ‘Mouflon’ sheep to roam around…
Rob built his own beautiful Oak framed house on his land and has since built many other timber framed structures on his site, the main one being the framing workshop. The workshop is a lovely space to work in, lots of natural day light and a speaker system that’s governed by the resident DJ Jake Daly. Jake was once Rob’s trusty apprentice but has since earned his stripes from years of toil behind circular saws and chain mortisers and is now a very knowledgeable framer (with a cracking taste in music!)
The Chestnut Festival Frames…
The 3 weeks I spent at Castle Ring worked out brilliantly. The guys were a little bit more freed up with projects when I arrived so it was decided that we’d crack on with a personal venture for a local festival called ‘Sheep Music’ that Rob is the director of. This consisted of a series of Chestnut ‘cruck’ frames that would could be relatively easily assembled to make a bar and workshop space for the festival. This project took the majority of the first 2 weeks of the placement.
The original 3D drawings of the cruck frames
In the workshop…
Starting with working out the kinks with the first cross frame, we soon gathered some serious momentum in the workshop, laying out, marking up, scribing, jointing, assembling and then disassembled each cross frame before moving on to the wall frames and ridge.
Check out the process below…
Raising day!…
By the end of the second week we were erecting the frames in the sunshine within the ‘castle ring’ of Rob’s land. This was bar far the highlight, I love small quirky structures so I couldn’t have asked for a better project to sink my teeth into and seeing the curved ‘crucks’ up the air for the first time was such a satisfying feeling
Let’s not forget the site manager, keeping things in check…
The Finished Frames…
Although we also worked on another project for an oak framed house in the third week, I just wanted to focus on this wonderful project…
On reflection…
My time with Rob and Jake was amazing and I couldn’t be more grateful to them for showing me the ropes. Rob appears to be an avid ‘blogger’ on the Castle Ring Oak Frame website and seems to do a much better job than myself so please check them out below…