The fabric of rural life

A crafts enthusiast is currently making the first piece of linen at her Munterconnaught home for the best part of two centuries.
Sandra Coote is taking the process from sewing seeds right through to weaving her own fabric and, in so doing, is mounting a mini revival of a long gone tradition that’s steeped in the area.  
Sandra’s husband Alan can trace his Coote family roots in the Knocknaveagh farm back to the late 1700s. However, it’s an entry in the 1821 census that piques Sandra’s interest.
“They were spinning flax - there were four women in the family, the mother and the three daughters, and the youngest was about 11,” reports Sandra, sitting on the sun-drenched patio last week. Under ‘occupation’ all four Coote females were each described as ‘spinners’.

 

Dominated
Sandra notes that this rural area of Cavan would have been dominated by tenant farmers on the Marquis of Headfort’s estate, many of whom would have been flax growers and spinners. Another document, this time dating from 1796, lists the many flax growers in the area.
“At that time it was grown extensively here,” says Sandra. 
“If you grew a rude of flax, you got a spinning wheel, given by the British government. If you had something like five acres of flax, you were actually given a loom to weave your linen thread into linen fabric.”
While Sandra may be a relative newcomer to producing linen, it should come as no surprise that she’s giving it a spin as she teaches a huge variety of workshops at her ‘Crafts of Ireland’ studio. With the lockdown restrictions in place, Sandra makes time to produce three videos per day, demonstrating a new skill for her popular Crafts of Ireland Facebook page.
Sandra’s flax experiment began with sewing flax seed in a 10sqm patch in their front garden last April. This year’s flax seeds have been sewn in recent weeks.
“It takes approximately 120 days between sewing and harvest,” she explains of the crop, which constantly produces and sheds flowers from July through to August.
“It’s just a stunning crop - in the morning you would have a sea of blue flowers, but they don’t last the whole day. The flowers will have fallen by late afternoon, and everywhere there’s a seed pod there’s a flower to form that seed pod.”
Flax is pulled rather than cut to ensure the fibres are as long as possible for spinning into linen thread. The next stage is ‘retting’, where the flax is soaked in stagnant water for up to 14 days to break down the outer shell. While Sandra used an old cast iron bath filled with water from a local river, traditionally bogholes would have been used for retting by many.
“There are still remains of some flax holes in this area,” enthuses Sandra.

Once retted, the bundles are spread out to dry and ready for the next stage, for which the Celt pays a visit to the Knocknaveagh farm.
“We built that apparatus for breaking it,” she says of a no-nonsense device called a ‘breaker’. Her son Eoin, who has a talent for woodwork, knocked it together for a Heritage Day demo. The device looks like a classroom guillotine with a blunt wooden lever that’s repeatedly lifted and smashed down in a chopping motion to break up the brittle shell of the flax fibres.
The next stage is called ‘scutching’ and involves scraping off the broken shell with what looks like a big wooden carving knife. A fibrous detritus called show (pronounced sh-ow like you’ve just hit yourself with the scutching knife) quickly accumulates around Sandra’s plimsoles. Back in the day it would have been gathered to fuel the homefire.

 

Customs
“There were scutching mills throughout the county, and farmers would have taken their flax that had been retted to the mills,” she says, adding that there was one nearby in Lurgan, and the remains of the building still exist. The scutched flax would then have been brought back to the farm and spun by the ladies in the family.
As she scutches, Sandra relays some of the old quirky customs associated with the cottage industry.
“If you were a female flax spinner, and you were single, you tied a gaily coloured ribbon on your distaff, and when you were spinning the bachelors would be able to tell you were single. You would pick your wife by the quality of her thread rather than by her appearance, because if you had a wife who was really good at spinning linen thread, she would bring in more of an income, and possibly teach her daughters.
“But when you got married, you changed the colour of your ribbon to a drab coloured ribbon. So it was almost like Tinder for flax spinners,” she says with a laugh.
Using a set of antique flax combs she sourced from Belarus on Ebay, Sandra combed the flax first with a coarse comb, then with a finer comb into what looks like a horse’s tail.
“Have you heard the term flaxon haired lady? It combs it shiney, it’s like blonde hair,” says Sandra.
Once combed, the strands are then ready to be spun. You dress the distaff - a little pillar on the spinning wheel - and begin spinning to produce linen thread.

 

Industrialisation
The thread then would have been sold - and provided a living for whole communities. However the early 1830s heralded the industrialisation of the process and flax began being spun in giant mills in Belfast.
“The cottage industry part of the spinning would have disappeared. So then it was the growing, scutching and selling of the fibre to the mills [that remained]. Definitely from about 1850 on most of the spinning in Ireland was done in Belfast. So possibly, there hasn’t been flax that was grown in Cavan, in this area, and processed, and spun for probably about 170 years.”
Sandra is passionate about old crafts and with the Coote family link, it resonates even more strongly with her.  
“It was something that completely disappeared then. It’s just nice to be able to replicate exactly what they were doing.
“I have a small little loom so I do intend to weave some of our own to get right through to the fabric end of it.”
She doesn’t anticipate producing huge supplies of linen from her modest flax crop. 
“I was told that, when you spin it, a full bobbin spun on a spinning wheel will be enough to make a handkerchief.”
“Aw bejesus,” the Celt sighed.
“Yeah I know.”
How long would that take?
“It’d take me a while,” she says with a laugh that suggests that the local linen sector is not about to be revived any time soon. “Ireland produced the best linen in the world, but probably part of the reason why it had to be industrialised, and disappeared from being a cottage industry, was the time involved.”