Shillelaghs tend to attract walkers. In the UK “walker” can mean anything from enthusiastic fitness types, to history-loving urban flaneurs, to rugged “six months worth of gear in a frame pack” types (known elsewhere in the world as “backwoodsmen”). But is there a shillelagh that could meet the needs of all those types, people who …
One of our most common emails is from Dungeons and Dragons players asking about the history of Shillelagh. It turns out the game has had a druid spell called “Shillelagh” in its rules for almost 40 years. In the game the spell enables the player to take an ordinary club or quarterstaff (early editions required an …
A local brought us an interesting project the other day. Evidently there have been some floods up in the valley and they’ve scoured out some blackberry on the banks upstream. Among the debris that came down was this nicely dried blackberry stick with a huge root ball attached. Root ball staves make for a good …
Judging by our collections a sensible man would need to own at least forty sticks before he seriously felt ready to face the world, but we might be extreme cases. We talk a lot here about different shillelagh having different roles, and a man (or woman) might have a longer rambling stick for the countryside, …
How many sticks are enough? The tradition of the two oaks. Read More »
It’s hard to read much of the literature of Shillelaghs and Irish stickfighting without coming across the phenomenon of the “Faction Fight”, or the “Fair Fight”. “Faction Fighting” refers to large organised groups of (usually) young, (usually) men, meeting to participate in a mass stickfighting battle. Sometimes they were described in terms we’d use to …
Fair Fighting and Shillelagh “too small for a war, too mean for a sport” Read More »
Somewhere under the workshop a colony of bumblebees have dug a nest. We’re all for that, something about the fat, good-natured pollen-spreaders is nice to see any time and a nice reminder when we’re working indoors that the natural world is still going on around us. However it can make us a little nervous. In …
This is a refinement that doesn’t get fitted to a lot of our shillelaghs – the trigger finger divot. It’s a little extra curve in the stave that helps your index finger find its natural groove under the head of the stave. In this way it’s kind of odd. You’d think having an extra “bit” …
There are a lot of theories about the blacking that people used to use on their staves. Some people talk about rubbing lead on a staff, others talk about boot polish… Both are possible, this was a time when your house wasn’t made of treated timber, so the presence of borer larvae was a real …
There are a range of opinions on the origin of the term “Shillelagh”. Some believe it refers to the Irish words sail éille which refers to a willow staff with a cord about the wrist. This is possible, although of the options, willow naturally tends not to grow in a way that makes good shillelagh, …
You’ll read us talk about “Immersiveness” a lot. One of the reasons to carry a stick on a walk, is that we’re four-limbed animals. We only walk with two of them now, but our brains are wired up to explore our environment with our tactile senses. The brain of four legged animals are constantly processing …
