Timber acquisition 2007-11-03 at Ornö

Day 5

On the 3rd of November, I, Lina and Markus set out to Ornö, where the grandfather of Lina, Lars-Olof Alm, owns some land. Friendly enough, he let us search for curved wood for the becoming knarr. Even if it will be some time before these pieces will be of use, it is wise to be ahead of time. My experience tells me that the acquisition may require considerable amounts of time. Curved trees won't usually last out from an overly zealous landowner, who removes them, and thus might be hard to find. The largest chance to find them would be on rocky and mountaneous ground, and on ground influenced by frost, such as clay soils next to marshland and stony ground. Another criterion which is good, would be if such an area lies somewhat near a road for transport homeward.

The search began along the waterfront of the property, and not surprisingly, this area yielded the most curved pieces we found on this day.

Almost immediately, Lina found a slightly curved trunk.

The overhead papers with bottom frames, standers, knees and crossbeams were taken out, and by sighting towards the trunk, a suitable in-timber could be chosen. It resulted in a stander in section 2,5 aft, that is to say: the stander between bottom frame 2 and 3 aft of the zero frame (the mid-frame). The tree was duly accounted and then positioned by the help of GPS and thereupon marked with an orange tape. The position atop a cliff next to the water will facilitate transport, when all one has to do is to chuck the felled trunk down into the water and pull it away towards a trailer when the time comes to fell it.

The search went on. The next find was Markus’. A fir root was found to have a suitable shape to form a knee piece. Now, fir is not the chosen material for Skulderlev 1, since the in-timbers consist of pine, oak or linden, wherefore this root might be accounted as a replacement, if it would be shown to be impossible to find one knee-piece in these sorts of wood.

Even if we didn’t find board timber on this ground, but still only curved pieces, we couldn't help glancing on the larger pines. Suddenly, we saw a pine which was straight and without any major branches, or any dead branches for the first 4-5 meters. Its branches and roots spread radially from the trunk, which indicated that it propably was straight. The thin red-brown bark indicated that it had grown rather swiftly, and as the saying goes, "frod", meaning swift grown and much more flexible than densely grown pine. Board timbers which were "frod" would be preferred in old-time ship building, as they are more flexible and less prone to cracks than dense timbers. The pine was some 60 cm in diameter at chest level. Propably, one can get some 4 metres long logs out of similar trunks, but we still aren't allowed to fell this one, as they want to retain such trees.

Yet another pine, this time a small one with a protruding limb would probably do as a knee and was marked.

We went back to Lars-Olof's cottage and had some nice lunch, whereupon the search continued on the land which abutted inwards towards the island. This was shown to be rather uneven ground, which, I’m sure, is fit for curved wood. Some curve pieces were found, too; but they were neither the right size nor shape for this kind of vessel. Markus had a splitting headache, and I recognised it from the beginning of the construction of Himingläva, when I was rather a beginner in the art of searching for curving wood. Concentrating as heavily as one does in this pursuit, it often leads to headache, or slight nausea. When you get used to it, you seldom get struck down by it.but how this comes about, I don't know. It could have something to do with the actual search behaviour, which results in the fact that a trained person faster sorts out irrelevant objects.

Sadly, we didn't find any more pieces of interest for our purpose, except the ones spotted before noon. The outcome was still fair, with two curved pieces for a stander and a knee-piece. Apart from that, we had a long, enjoyable walk in shifting weather.

Håkan Altrock