Saturday 5 December 2009

Old Sycamore Bowl

These photos are of an old sycamore bowl belonging to my Dad - it’s been around for as long as I can remember but I’ve only just got round to taking some pictures of it.  They aren’t brilliant shots and I must take some more sometime in better light with a tripod.








 

The bowl originally belonged to my great-granny Annie Marsh and to her parents, whose name was Whitely, before her so may well date back to the early 19th century.  They were farmers at Hilltop Farm, Cumberworth in West Yorkshire near to Huddersfield.

The bowl was used in the dairy for making butter in. It’s 6 inches high and 16-17 inches in diameter and must have been quite a valued item to consider making the charming and fairly elaborate repairs to the split.  Whether it was still used for its original purpose afterwards we’ll never know - somehow I doubt it.

3 comments:

Seanhellman said...

That is an interesting bowl, do you know how the repair was done? Is that wire meandering down the side or is it a flat strip of metal, that was hammered in?

Sean

Robin Fawcett said...

It's a serpentine, flat strip hammered in Sean. The repair is a large part of the charm of the bowl.

Twinwood Carving said...

Pretty bowl and a great story to boot. I make wooden bowls and one of most recent was a sycamore bowl. I wrote a blog post on the making of that bowl, you can find it here http://twinwoodcarving.blogspot.com/2010/07/making-of-sycamore-bowl.html All the best, Joe.