The Bumbling Basketeer

Simon Cooper is the only oak swill basket maker left in Scotland. There are perhaps a handful of practitioners across the whole of the UK, and the craft sits on the Heritage Crafts Red List as critically endangered. The work he does in a small workshop in Crieff, Perthshire, is what stands between this tradition and the end of it.

Tattie baskets, by another name

Oak swill is a southern Lake District form by origin. In Scotland the same baskets, made the same way, are called tattie baskets, after the potatoes they once carried. They moved coal onto steam ships. They went to market and to the hen run and out onto the riverbank with anglers. The lore goes that apprentices tested a finished basket by standing in it. Simon repeats this with the caveat that he wouldn't recommend trying it.

The process is slow. Coppiced oak is split along the grain, cleaved into thinner and thinner strips, dressed, boiled, and then woven while still wet around a peeled hazel rim. A peeled hazel handle is bent in. On some pieces a willow hoop goes through the rim too. Nothing is glued. Nothing is nailed. The basket holds because of the way it is woven.

Brushes on the wall

When he isn't weaving, Simon hand-binds brushes and brooms (broomcorn, tampico, arenga), wrapped in coloured cord against an oak bark tanned leather handle, often with a thin woven oak strip inset as a nod to the swill work. They are made to hang on the wall, not to be put away in a cupboard.