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© Somerset Tourism
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From cradle to grave: willows and basketmaking in Somerset |
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Ancient origins
Willows were woven into prehistoric wooden trackways in the Brue Valley, and remnants of hurdles and baskets have been found at the Iron Age Glastonbury Lake Village site. The Romans prized willows more highly than corn, cultivating them for basketmaking, furniture, and chariots, and a recent archaeological dig unearthed a piece of willow basket at a Roman salt-making site on the River Huntspill.
Traditional basketmaking still continues in Somerset today
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Through the centuries baskets were a routine, unglamorous feature of daily life. Robust and unbreakable, they were used as containers for storage and transport; for cages, fish traps, and even the coracle boat, which is no more than an upturned basket covered with hide. Villages and towns everywhere had their own basketmakers.
However, with the Industrial Revolution, enormous quantities of willows were needed for standardised baskets in factories, and for packing and deliveries. Willows were also in demand for the wicker furniture fashionable in Victorian society. The wetlands of Somerset provided a natural habitat for the Salix triandra, the willow preferred by basketmakers, and at the beginning of the 19th Century more than 3,000 acres of willows were planted commercially around the Rivers Isle, Tone and Parrett.
In demand
The atmospheric Somerset Levels
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Local farmers and enterprising newcomers jumped onto the willow bandwagon and by the end of the 19th Century there were hundreds of willow growers, willow merchants, basketmakers and furniture makers on the Somerset Levels and Moors. They supplied the London hotel and catering trades, the fishing industry, factories in the industrial North, the Post Office, and butchers, bakers, farmers and fruit growers.
Baskets were standardised, and the 1916 British Amalgamated Union listed precise measurements and quantities of willow for many items, including hawkers’ baskets, plate baskets, scuttles, wool skeps, and linen baskets, as well as pheasant hampers, bread trays, sieves, pickers, cycle crates, homing pigeon baskets and even bath chairs!
Words: Kate Lynch
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