should have either been more practical, more narrative, or more contemplative, instead was disappointing proportion of all three, a master of none. feels like it would be more interesting to hang out with the author than to read his book.

I adore this book. It’s my favorite thing that I’ve read in a very long time. In fact, I’m fairly certain that if I were a book, I would be this one. It’s not for everyone. In fact, it’s so very niche that I’m almost amazed it got published at all. I’d thought surely I was the only person on earth who could wax poetic about the beautiful nuance of hedge laying, but apparently there are at least two of us. (Pleased to meet you, Mr. Langlands.) If you are not the sort of nerd who makes things with your hands and dabbles in flint napping or other absurdly obsolete crafts purely for the sake of experiencing the technologies used by our ancestors for generations, you will be monstrously bored by this book. Walk away now. Save yourself the trouble. But if you do happen to be just the right brand of Luddite, oh you will love it.

It’s difficult to describe this book concisely. It blends archaeology (specifically experimental archaeology) with philosophy and ecology. It’s both exceedingly romantic (which it readily acknowledges) and surprisingly practical. It’s amazing to me to see the ways in which humans have historically made use of the materials locally available to meet their needs. It’s not overtly stated as such, but I would say this is in many ways a book about human ecology: it examines our place in the world and how we interact with it. It’s beautiful, and I could write bad poetry about how much I adore it until the end of time. Instead I think I’ll go experiment with hedge laying...

DNF

I rarely every deliberately put books down because I don’t enjoy them, and I *really* wanted to like this book, so it’s unfortunate this was one of them. As someone who practices a historic craft, I too lament the losses that came with industrialization and the disappearance of historic trades. However, there’s only so much of that I can take. I’m really tired of the “all we do nowadays is press buttons” argument. Throughout all I read, I felt like I was being scolded for living in the world I do—very holier than thou. I think Langlands’ critique should have been expanded to the economy as well, that would encompass a fuller picture of what is behind the disappearance of crafts.

Some good (basic) information here, but overall it’s pretty uncritically nostalgic.

I won this book as a goodreads first-reads win.

Such a beautifully written treatise on the value and place of craeft in our lives (more importantly, MISSING from our lives), and a break-down on how craeft originates in the environment around us, our natural resources determining the kind of crafts our ancestors created from those resources, from willow baskets to hazel woven hurdles, various types of thatching, and the manner in which boats were created.

This book DOES focus almost exclusively on the British Isles, with slight mental journeying into the Viking Era and Sweden and Denmark. To that end, those who are looking to read about craefts from the Middle and Far East, Africa, Australia, or North and South America will be a bit disappointed to find nothing of their ancestry featured here. It does allow one to look at the craefts of ones own ancestors and do a bit of creative thinking about how those ancestors craefted from their own native environments.

My ONE criticism of this book is the lack of diagrams or pictures. When the author is discussing the making of hurdles or trugs or managing a hedgerow, it would be helpful to have pictures to aid in understanding what the various terminology means without pulling up videos on youtube.

Finishing this book, I'm highly inclined to try a bit of willow-weaving of my own, from the stand of willow in the corner of my front yard. At the very least, creating my own walking stick from that same willow, would be a delight after the inspiration offered by the author.

Great read! We have a tendency to underappreciate the skills of our forbears and paint the modern internet age in rosy colors, but that is a dangerous thing to do, particularly now as we see the effects of plastics and fossil fuel use on the planet. In each chapter of this book I found myself excited about the skills Langlands was describing. Now I want a weekend cottage where I can whittle, weave baskets, make and use old-fashioned bee skeps -- and pretty much everything else he talks about, too. (Let's forget about the fact that as an archaeologist this is what he does for a living, so my ability to do all these things as weekend hobbies is impossible. But still, I can daydream.)

The only thing I didn't like was the male-centricity of this book. Even the weaving chapter focused only on male weavers of tweed. Really, now, I'm no archaeologist but I'm pretty sure men *and women* were integral to the success of any smallholding.