Hopper Teaches us the basics of Hurdle Making - an impromptu education!

[@hogsnoot]

Oh dear , blind leading the blind...

[@louisabendall108]

Malcy50in the land of the blind the obeyed man is king for Gods sake if you want to learn go to a professional hes not even splitting the hazel that hurdle wouldn't keep a moth in bloody mossweaver

[@WillWalking]

He is a 35+ year professional, he was just casually showing a bunch of weirdos in the woods a very rough guide, after we accosted him during his afternoon walk. The info he gave was wnough for us to make a 25x25ft hurdled floor made from individual panels. I wish we'd planned a proper video, but his guidance was sufficient. It's just rough woodland stuff. Sorry it's not slicker.

[@britishpilgrimage4106]

Please be aware this is not a professional GUIDE video. No hurdles are made in this video. The only visual example is an extremely rough and quick approximation of the techniques, designed ONLY to demonstrate the crudest principles required. Hopper was not making a hurdle or a video - he was kindly introducing a bunch of people who had NO idea to the basic principles required to make hurdles. We just clicked the record button. If you are expecting a well-made lesson detailing the stages of hurdle-making in clear visual form, this is not it. Best go elsewhere. Thie is a document of a real and immediate lesson kindly given by a man with 40 years professional experience - given without preaparation after tea in 15 minutes of his spare time without forewarning. What he shows and tells us with this crude example made sense to us, and cleared away many of our misconceptions. This lesson enabled us to create a winter woodland home with a floor made entirely from hurdles - very quickly. This video is therefore a record of the transmission of knowledge from an expert to a bunch of totally ignorant people - us - which succeeded in grounding us in the basic techniques required to go ahead and learn further for ourselves. If you are a professional hurdle maker upset that this does not represent your craft or skill, you are misconstruing the video's purpose. Please by all means make a better video yourself. But also try not to be upset by our recording and sharing this transmission of knowledge moment which was successful in teaching us what we needed to know in order to move forward in making a great big hurdle house before the snows came. That's it!

[@SensibleRodent]

weaving is a wonderfully versatile craft. weave your floor. weave your underpants. weave your dinner plates. you can do it all!

[@LilyGazou]

I learned something today. I’ve been looking at the greens around me and wondering how to make it into a fence.

[@zekehooper]

I'm in america and find this really cool. I wonder why our woodcraft is different from Englands? We don't do the wattle here....at least not in Oregon. I grew up watching "The Woodwright Shop" and love anything to do with wood craft and the old ways of doing things.

[@tektoms]

excellent video guys, nice to see one without "bushcraft course" highlighted anywhere. Nice of you to share, and nice of the guy to accept to be filmed! Dunno if you're stilll in the woods, but if you are - good luck to you all!

[@daLizardBreth]

I'm such a nerd! I love my history & seeing stuff like this always leaving me daydreaming about the tradesmen who used to build the wattle & daub houses for their villein townsfolk.

[@howiedewitt_]

Wattles are used to keep sheep in right? I haven't encountered many sheep operations in America. Cattle, yes. I'm assuming that hurdles wouldn't be very effective against 800 lb heifers. Barbed wire and/or electric fencing is all I see. Shame. Hurdles are and living hedgerows are charming and ecological. Good wind blocks. Might help with soil erosion in many areas of the country.

[@ladyofthemasque]

A combined lesson in Climate, Ecology, Farming & History, if anyone is interested... The problem with hurdles and cattle ranching isn't just the weight of the animal, though that is a solid concern. On the Great Plains, trees are few and far between, and certainly there aren't any native hazelwood trees. Not all of the trees in America can be coppice managed even when you do find them (the Pacific Northwest's plethora of pines and douglas firs usually just die when you cut them to stumps; they don't grow back vigorously), but again, the Great Plains didn't have many trees for making fences. Importing the lumber for full rail fencing was expensive in the 1800s, and stones were even more so. There aren't many stones in the soils of the prairies, so you can't just dig around in your garden to find the materials to make stout, unmortarted drystane fences like you can find all over Scotland and parts of England, etc. It might have been possible to make sod-built fences, but the native grasses of the prairie have very thick and deep root systems, and it wasn't until a superior quality of hardened steel was available for ploughshares that could cut through the roots of the sod that farming became easier--regular iron ploughshares had to be constantly re-sharpened, and were difficult to draw through the sod even with the help of cattle or horses to pull the ploughs. Many farmers who tried often found it wasn't worth the energy expenditure. The creation of barbed wire allowed ranchers and farmers to use a bare minimum of lumber for the posts, a bare minimum in construction effort--saving them time and energy to spend on other projects--and let the pain of the barbs deter cattle from rubbing up against the fenceline, either to ease an itch or to see if they could push it out of their way. Cattle in a stampede would still knock over the fence (only a stone wall or a high sod berm might stop them), but wire is easier and cheaper to splice together with a short bit of fresh wire than trying to find fresh long boards to replace all the splintered bits. Hedgerows have another problem on the plains; their root systems aren't very deep compared to prairie grasses. Without irrigation, and with the prairie winds constantly blowing, accelerating evaporation from leaf transpiration, hedges have a tendency to dry out and wither. It's for this reason that the "reforestation" projects, trying to grow vast numbers of trees on the prairie homesteads, often failed; the wrong types of trees, ones with broad but shallow root systems, were picked. Homesteaders who tried to grow orchards often found themselves hauling bucketloads of water to try to save their trees during the heat of summer. Not until electrically pumped wells and irrigation systems came along could large amounts of trees, hedges, vegetable bushes and so forth be adequately watered. It should be noted that the average level of the water table has been gradually lowering every single year in the Midwest for most of the 70 years because irrigation demands more water than the climate and its weather patterns deposit into the land in the form of snow and rain. Plus the constantly exposed soil allows far more rainwater to run off into the nearest streams and rivers than it did when prairie plants covered the landscape, with their stems and leaves and root systems helping to slow water runoff, giving it more time to soak into the ground.

[@DaisyDebs]

Excellent ! Thankyou :)

[@Marinedude2]

cool

[@WillWalking]

He's been doing it 40 years. I think many ways exist.

[@AndrewLale]

Why don't these videos ever start at the beginning?

[@WillWalking]

there was no beginning, he was just a stranger wandering through the woods that we hassled to teach us what we needed to know to build our house. This is not a planned media operation.