Hello and welcome back to Will I Vike It?Today I'm at Butser Ancient Farm for their Viking Boat Burning.As you can see the boat is behind me if you're watching on YouTube.And my guest is Mark from Two Circle Designs.Hello.Welcome to the show.
Thank you.So you're here because you make things from
Yeah, so I'm an environmental artist or land artist and I make art large, ideally as large as possible out of natural materials.I just happen to grow maybe 30,000 rods of willow every year that I planted like 15 years ago.
So every winter there's this sort of being in tune with the seasons.It's like going into the water meadows.I've got three locations. where I grow willow and my Rebecca, my wife and I, we've been working together for 20 years, right?Yeah.
And two circles a sign.And we cut by hand all that material and we use it for projects all through the year.
Not just the Vikas Viking longship, which we'll be burning this evening, but also the wicker man that gets burned on this site for Beltane around May the 1st.It's a really special time for us, my wife and I. We got married on Beltane, May the 1st.
So now your anniversary is always going to be... Always Beltane, yeah.So we got married on Chanktonbury Ring.
With like this druid guy.But we had the centre of Chanktonbury ring was off limits since the 1987 storm.Yeah.So we cut a few gaps north east, south west to do a processional route to get in there.The landowner didn't like that much.
So he was he was arrested.Oh wow.
But he said it's OK.You know, when I was there and I explained to the policeman, I had all my ancestors with me and it was the right thing to do.And they let him off. for aggravated trespass.I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff happened.
But anyway, May the 1st is really significant.And these timing, the times and the rhythms of the year are really important because things grow, things decay.
they have a short time, they exist in the time that they're there for, and then they go to nothing.
So you've changed my line of questioning a little bit now.
No, no, it's fine, because later on I was going to ask you about the sourcing of the materials, because especially today everyone's a lot more environmentally conscious, so I was going to ask you about the sourcing of the materials, but obviously you're growing them yourself, as you said, it's a natural material, so you're having to, I guess, coppice,
So it depends on the variety of the willow.There's like up to 400 types of willow because they're, for the scientists among us, they're diploid hybrids.They're like copies and clones of themselves, but they can cross fertilize and form new strains.
So the willow, we grow probably about seven different varieties that grow from maybe one and a half meters up to three or four meters a year.
So depending on what you want to make, whether it's a basket or a large woven structure, you go to what you need.
But then if I need something longer, so a structure that wants to go all the way over and down again, maybe a small building or a bender or like a sweat lodge, use hazel.Because hazel is this wonderful material that can grow up to sort of
six, seven, eight meters sometimes in an overstood forest that hasn't been cut, hasn't been coppiced for maybe 20, 30 years.All these sun shoots, they go straight up.
And they're still only, I'm mixing my sizes here, but it's about an inch and a half.Seven, eight meters, inch and a half diameter.Yeah, and that's really great for structures.
And if you want, sometimes you want something to last a lot longer, use sweet chestnut, but anything long and bendy, really.
So how did you get into making structures?So you initially, did you start off deliberately farming this willow because you said you planted it?
Yeah, I planted this, I planted a large willow bed probably 2005-2006 with the intention of using it to make sculptures. But I grew up in the South Downs National Park, near a village called Bosham, south of Chichester.
And I had a really close friend who grew up on the side of Bow Hill, where Kingly Vale is.You've got this, the largest hue forest in Europe.Spent all my time up there. when I was in primary school.
Every day we'd be around there being sort of Bronze Age, Iron Age, Neolithic people with our staffs just wandering the woods and whittling and making camps and things like that.
So I've been doing that since I was, I don't know, since primary school, seven, eight years old, making structures.And then I went to art school as a painter in sort of 1992, 1993.And I finished with a degree in sculpture.
So I went from drawing, which is like large-scale drawing with charcoal or drawing with paint, to thinking well how without the world of virtual reality back in the early 90s, no real virtual reality, so how do you make your drawings three-dimensional?
How do you make them real?You have to make sculpture, you've got to make large woven form and it sort of expanded into architecture and then teaching archaeology and going into schools and sort of all my passions and interests have come together.
My family, we're also from Singleton. My mother's side from Singleton, they moved there in 1700 into Singleton.
Of course, there's the Open Air Museum there, this living museum there, similar to Butser Ancient Farm, but up to the 20th century, I would say.
And fascinated by the architecture and how things were done traditionally, the old ways, sometimes looking at the tools or inventing tools. that disappeared within an archaeological record have been quite interesting to do.
Not just the flint, but you can grow tools, you can grow wooden tools, which don't exist in the archaeological record because they've rotted out.You just, okay, well, let's see what we can do.
So if they don't exist, how do you know what to base them on?Yeah, well, there's evidence for antler picks if you want to dig through some chalk, but if you want to
furrow the ground and you look at modern metal tools now like a grub axe or a wide pickaxe or an adze even for doing chair making or boat building where you could if you want to move bits of saw then you could use a wide piece of wood grown from maybe a tree that's fallen and then you've got the sun chute which would be the handle and then you've got this wide piece of wood to work with you can harden it in the fire things like that and we've tried that and we've used that on buildings
Here, whenever I do structures on Butts Rancher Farm, I'll make a flat surface.I'll try and make a floor surface first and then build a structure from that.
There is a couple of buildings in the Stone Age area on this farm where we've covered them with animal skins.Yeah.
Just having a photo shoot, mid-podcast.It's all good.Thank you.Yeah, so I was going to ask you as well.I haven't even looked at my questions yet because we've kind of gone off from what I was planning.
It's because you asked me a question and then I'll just go off.No, no, that's... I will bring it back.That's all good.What I was going to ask you, though, is, I guess, initially, how you became involved with Butzer itself.
Oh, OK.Yeah.So during lockdown, in 2020, 2021.I was artist in residence for the South Downs National Park.And that culminated with like a well-being project of getting people into the woods, into nature, because we needed the space, right?
We had social distancing and all of that.So it was about getting people outside in nature and just experience what's there.But they wanted a destination.There was a story about Askapark the Giant, and he was one of the smallest giants of his type.
He was like 10 meters, 30 feet high.And he was the squire of Bevis the Knight, reportedly around Southampton.So Southampton Bargate, there's like an archway, the old city wall entry, and there's some carvings there of Askapark the Giant.
So anyway, rather than doing a whole giant, We said okay, what would need the structure?We want somewhere people to sit And there was a Giants chair in Butts Ranch in Queen Elizabeth's Country Park.
Yeah in the 1970s and 80s There was this big chair that people would go to as a destination.So a new destination temporary destination There is the sorry ask apart the Giants head.So the head of ask apart the giant
with his big head, hid in the woods.And Butser Ancient Farm, they saw it and said, well, if you can do a head, you can do a whole wicker man.I went, absolutely.But that wasn't my first time being involved with Butser Ancient Farm.
Rebecca and I, we worked with UCL, University College London, with their first year archeology students at West Dean since maybe 2009.
and we would just do a one-day paleolithic house weaving course where they would make a woven hut during the day and then we would then look so they would know what to look for when they're on archaeological digs they can see the posthole evidence maybe a burnt bit of
half in the center or something and they can maybe the walls had dropped and then they can see the weaving decay or in you know when they're on their digs when their later life and they're professional archaeologists so we did that a few times and then it moved to this spot in fact the same spot where the boat is yeah and in 2019 we did two structures here and that was the first time we actually
got involved with Butts Ranch and Farm, but I've been coming here since I was a child.This is like the second or third site, it was on a different location in the 1970s and 80s.
So I went there as a child and I've been fascinated with history and archaeology and architecture and just how people lived ever since.
So you're interested, sounds like you're quite interested in kind of recreating things, right?So the more, what's the term for it?Experimental archaeology, that kind of thing.
And you're currently in the process of building a replica house, aren't you?
I'm involved with this reconstruction of, I think it's house one of Wickdown.Wickdown is, let me think, it's in Cranbourne Chase in Dorset.Know it well?
Yes, and it was, the dig was Martin, I can't remember his name, anyway there's an archaeologist called Martin, that's fine, and he did an excavation in the 1980s and they found, and in the 1990s maybe 1996,
And they did, they found post-oil evidence which had some really interesting pottery, which also ties into the similar to the pottery in Ireland.It's a grooved ware.And what else can I say about it?Oh, yes.
So looking at these buildings, a lot of the reconstructions on farms, this farm, there's a lot of string.And if you've ever made string, out of nettles or flax, it is quite time-consuming.
And if you're going to go to that effort just to tie thatch on, you'd have to have a lot of time, very time-consuming.So you could tie it on with willow.
uh very fresh willow or what we've done with this building is we've made a skin a woven skin of willow and hazel over the whole roof structure and then we've pushed spars in yeah into that weave to hold it using gravity for the thatch and we'll see how long that lasts because
Ideally, the angle of the spars would be going the other way because of the way the water falls.But we'll see how the water reacts to the roof or how the roof reacts to water.
Is this the first time anyone's tried to replicate that?Yeah.Yeah, wow.
I have a separate question, which probably isn't particularly relevant to the podcast, but while I think of it, someone asked me earlier, is that these spikes that you've got coming through the roof, are they going to stay like that or are you cutting them off?
At the moment, some, I think at the lower levels, they'll be cut off.But higher up, I mean, if this was a technique that was used, it'd be perfect to push wool against or even like smoke fish.
I did wonder that.And like, you can like stick your meat up there and smoke your meat.And I guess they might fall off over time if you did that.When it's cooked.He stood there all day.Come on.That reminds me of my granddad with the pancakes.Yeah.
Stuck to the ceiling. Yeah, so back to structures like this.Yeah.I wondered what you thought.I mean, you talked about, like, the seasons earlier, right, and growing things.So how does it feel when you have to watch something that you've spent?
Because you've spent how many months building this?
Oh, this has been about a month, so three to four weeks.
Because the Beltane one is a bit of a bigger project, right?
That was four months to make and about 25, 30 minutes to burn.And this year it was It was not exactly painful, but it was sad to see him go.It's like if he had a couple more weeks of people going, you know, isn't that great?
But everything has its time.Things only exist for the time that they're there.And it's a bit like an opera performance or a poetry or someone singing a song.I mean, it's just gone.So it's there.It exists for that time.And then it's a memory.
I'm good with that.What I like is seeing how these things burn.Specifically, not about the burning, but the making of this.Each rib of the boat has been carefully sourced.
I mean, I've been through a hazel coppice looking for bendy hazel that's grown in that shape.And there's 60 rods
sails, you could say, or uprights in there, probably 1,500 to 2,000 rods of willow, which some of it was cut in January, and some of it has been used in other projects already.
So other festivals I've done over the year, I've sort of been able to reuse some of the material.So some of this boat's been at Glastonbury Festival, some of it's been in Arundel Festival, some of it's been inside a gallery in Chichester.
So it's nice to, the journey of this boat isn't just from the water meadow to here.It's been all around the country.Some of it's been all around the country.The shields were made by myself and my brother.
My brother's a prop maker and he teaches at Chichester College.And he made the shields last year as well and the oars last year. Yeah, I just love collaborating with other artists to make stuff.What else can we say about the structure?
Well this year, this boat's unique this year.It's the first time that the public can actually go inside the boat before it's burnt.So there's a platform area at the bow, at the front of the boat.
Probably a large family, maybe eight people, can experience being at the front of the Viking longship and maybe have a Titanic moment with each other.
Should we do that after?Yeah.Yeah, so as far as these structures go, I mean, what's the biggest thing you've ever made?
Is it the... I would say the Wicker Man last year, this year actually, Beltane 2024, was the largest structure that we've made.Up till then, 10 meters, I suppose.But that was at an arts festival in Canada.
amongst some trees, whereas this wicker man was freestanding and you could go all the way up to the head.
So next year we're thinking, well, couldn't we do a wicker man where the public can go inside safely and maybe reenact sticking their head and their arms out of various parts.
Yeah, just brings back the film The Wicker Man.Yes, it does a bit.
I mean, how far down the rabbit hole of macabre and celebration, can you go?
So is it, I guess there must be a limit to how high you can go as well, right?I mean, structurally, there's... I don't know.
I don't know.There's a willow artist in Russia and he's made huge, I mean, much, maybe twice the height of the Wicker Man, incredibly high.He uses metal and then with a willow skin, but you know, I think,
If it can support its own weight, then you can make anything.Yeah.
Yeah.I guess if you set fire to it, there's a safety limit as well.Yeah.Rather than a structure.Oh yeah.So the only other question I was going to ask you is what's the favorite piece you've made over the years?
One of the favorite pieces I've made was a collaboration with maybe 1500 school kids. for the spire, it was called the Spire of Peace.It was a nine meter willow spire inside the Chichester Cathedral, North North Transept.
And we went into schools and worked with youth groups and young carers and people with special needs. and the Down Syndrome community, and they made paper birds and butterflies, which decorated the structure.
We had a little side room, little woven side room where people could write messages of peace and thoughts, and then stick that to the inside.But they ended up with thousands and thousands.
The whole structure was ended up covered up with all these labels.It was very moving. That was for the Armistice in 2018, so 100 years since the Armistice.
We did a similar project for the beginning, so 100 years since the beginning of the First World War, so that was 2014.Similarly, we went into schools and youth groups and they
they traced their hand and they researched people who lived in their own ancestry a hundred years ago and that covered a roundabout with these red and white hand-shaped poppies across the roundabout.
So I think it's not always about it being made of willow, it's about people coming together as a shared experience to create something that hasn't been before.Yeah, that's really nice.
As we're open to the public, and I know you've got probably thousands of people that will want to talk to you and ask you similar questions, unless you think I've missed anything, is there anything you would like to cover that I haven't asked you?
Well, I'd like to know more about sort of Viking food.
Because I know the labels.
As I said earlier on, I'm from West Sussex, I'm from the countryside, I spent a lot of time eating berries off trees and eating nettles and processing whores into almost like fruit bars sort of thing, squashing them down.
Very delicious, but I don't know whether that's like a prehistoric thing or whether that's something that went up to in the viking period?
A lot of foraging kind of dies out I think once you start to get into farming period so once you get into like what bronze age people start to farm obviously if you're busy tending your animals and your crops you don't have as much time to go and forage but there's no reason to say they wouldn't supplement their diet with with these things I mean we have evidence that
rose hips and whores and crab apples, that kind of thing.And it seems hard to imagine that they would then necessarily farm those things.
I mean, I wonder if the diet was much better and people's teeth much better because there's no real sugar.
Yeah, but then there's no dental care.Yeah, true.Yeah.But there'd be less processed sugar.You're right.Yeah.I don't know.It's yeah.Once you're busy with with farming and that kind of thing.I mean, you could send the kids out foraging.
That would be plausible as well.
Yeah.Yeah.I mean, what's something that people do throughout this time of year, they're out there getting blackberries, they're out there getting sloughs and apples.
But we have more leisure time today than they have, right?I mean, they would have been busy.Even if you want a loaf of bread, you've got to grind the flour to make the bread.You know, it's a whole process.Yeah.
But I think it also ties into what you were saying about your willow growing and working with the seasons, right?So they're having to eat seasonally.We can get stuff all year round now, but actually... they wouldn't have that kind of luxury.
Yeah, and storage.I mean, you either eat it before it goes off or find some ingenious way of storing it.
Yeah, pickling, salting, drying.We talked a bit with the house about smoking things on the roof.
You know, there are techniques to make things last longer, but it's certainly going to be a lot more of a seasonal diet, which I guess fits in with your ethos.Yeah, thank you.Yeah. I mean, it's a lot to summarize in.Yeah.Yeah.
So there are seven questions I ask every guest.Sure.And I know you don't know these.Some of these are going to seem a bit strange, probably.But the first one would be if you had an unlimited budget, what would be your dream project?
It doesn't have to be related to what you do.No, I would.
Part of the reason why I got into sculpture stroke archeology architecture is because I wanted to build, I thought if I ever needed to, if I was on a remote island, I could build my own house if I needed to.
So I spent many years working in sort of trades, carpentry, roofing, flooring, all kinds of building trades.So that if I ever needed to, I could.So I had this dream that one day I'll buy an island and just build my own place.
Actually, I'm not about being on my own, because it's community where it's at.Taking yourself away from the world is not that beneficial to people's own sort of well-being, really.
You've got to be in a community, everyone with their own skill set, I think.So, if unlimited budget, I'd like to do an installation in the Tate Gallery.Yeah?Yeah, in the turbine hall.
Not had that answer yet.Excellent.All right.So next question.Yeah.Um, do you think you could survive on a Viking age diet?Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.Okay.That was easy.Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.Yeah.I've, uh, um, I did, uh, there was a time in the, in the nineties, I lived in a bender in the woods.Um, and it was lovely in the summer.Not so great in the winter.Um,
But I've got some grounding on what it's like to forage and live off what you can find.Yeah.Yeah.
Yeah.Yes, I definitely could.Is there anything you'd miss on a Viking Age diet?No.No.No?
Well, no, no.I tend to, you know, I've got a diet of sort of fruit, vegetables, and fish and meat as it is, quite simply.I grow quite a lot of my own food in my garden, so.
Maybe some of the varieties, some of the vegetables that weren't around, maybe, I don't know.I mean, oranges and bananas.
Definitely none of them.None of those.No.Stuff like tomatoes, potatoes, chilies.A lot of people pick coffee, chocolate.These are all kind of from the Americas. Yeah, acorn coffee.We've done acorn coffee.Yeah, it doesn't taste too bad.
No, it's all right.It's caffeine free, but I guess you'd get used to being caffeine free, right?Yeah.So there are alternatives.Yeah.Yeah, but nothing other than bananas and oranges, maybe.Yeah, I do like a bit of tropical fruit.Yeah.
Okay, so the next question is, what's the weirdest thing in your kitchen? What's the weirdest thing that you can eat or just in?
Just in general?Our kitchen, what's we got?Oh, we've got lots of baskets and garlic hanging down, then verbena.We've got various tea, interesting teas.Yeah.What else have we got?
We've got probably a row of, well, weird for people who come round, right?They'll go, what's in those jars? Okay, so it's like a line of jars where we make our own kombucha.Okay.Okay, that looks disgusting.My wife hates the stuff, the scoobies.
I mean, they don't look great.You know, we do ours every eight days.We put hibiscus in and verbena and ginger, chamomile tea, a bit of green tea.And it's, after eight days, it's sort of slightly fizzy.Yeah.You know, you can be like really acidic.
like vinegar yeah if you don't get it right but ours we got a point where it's like it's lovely it's like elderflower champagne sort of quality i've got a friend who uses honey instead of sugar so you get a bit more of a i suppose meaty flavor to it without being alcohol okay i'll try that yeah so yeah different different sugars can vary the flavors as well i think that sometimes gets overlooked yeah yeah so that's the weirdest culinary thing i mean like i say with baskets there's various carved wooden spoons and
Yeah.Yeah.So what's the worst thing you've ever eaten?
I once tried, I once thought, okay, so with potato, you know, when they, they have the stalks and they, they like, you have the, they go up the eyes, these little white things.I thought, well, these edible right?
Disgusting.I don't think they are edible aren't they?Well I discovered that they they aren't edible, they're disgusting.Yeah.In fact you know they're probably poisonous.
Yeah I was gonna say I think they might because they're all in the nightshade family.
Yeah yeah so that's that's when I realized you know that was probably the most disgusting thing I've eaten.Yeah all right.And there's been various leaves things that I've
I thought, oh, I mean, I do lots of nettles and sea beets from the beach and things like that.But sometimes I'll go, oh, I wonder what that's like, and I'll cook it up.And it's like, no, no, it's probably dangerous.
It's like to live life on the edge or the edge of the hedge.Yeah.Yeah.
What's the most memorable meal you've ever had?
I think, um, Fresh sardines from the port down in Valencia.Just going down to the port and getting fresh sardines and then cooking them up.My mother lived in Spain for some short time.Yeah, just delicious and fresh.
I would have said octopus, but I've now gone down the road that octopus are really intelligent and I'm never probably gonna eat octopus again.But there's that film that my octopus teacher and I'm thinking, no, you're too cool to be eaten.
There's gradually the list is getting smaller like whale and pigs and like, oh, they're all intelligent.Yeah.Yeah.Animals are smart, right?Yeah.So the very last question, the premise is that you've died.
Your family and friends are preparing your grave goods.Ideal, considering we're in front of a Viking longship that's going to get burned this evening.What food and drink do you get to take to the feast in Valhalla?
Oh, to drink a jug of HSB. We're quite close to where the brewery was at Hornedine, Hornedine Special Brew, HSB, the brewery closed, they stopped producing it, but now it's been bought.Anyway, delicious, my favorite beer, I've been drinking.
I don't think I've ever had it.HSB, probably, it's like a ruby ale.
Yeah, I quite like a ruby ale, so I think I'd probably like it.
Food, I think, my favorite food my favorite snack is like chickpeas and mackerel yeah just like fried up so it's all crispy that's pretty nice lovely yeah that'll do me yeah
All right, Alan, do you want to give yourself a quick social media plug, website, anything like that?
All right, yeah.So, yeah, I'm Mark Anthony Hayden Ford.I'm an environmental artist or land artist, work with natural materials.
And for the last 20 years, I've been working with my wife, Rebecca Ford, and we have like a company where we go into schools or we run arts festivals and travel the world making sculptures out of sticks called Two Circles Design.
on all platforms, Instagram, Facebook, even TikTok, two circles to sign.
Brilliant.Well, thanks for your time today.Thank you.I'm sure you've got better things to do than sit and talk to me as we're in the middle of a festival.
But yeah, I appreciate your time.Thanks for having me.And I'm looking forward to seeing how this boat burns.
Yes.So what I'll do now, guys, for those that are watching, I'll put a clip on the end of it burning.All right.And that's where we'll end the episode.Great.Thank you.Thanks, Mark.
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