Learning Rural Skills at TASK

Much to my family’s amusement, it turns out I’m not too bad at brick-laying. It’s a hitherto unknown ability I discovered on a press day at TASK where we had the chance to try some rural skills.

TASK, set up by award-winning landscaper Rupert Keys, offers courses for both professionals and the public in everything from laying paving and grass to planting design and making garden trugs from willow.

For many years, Worcestershire-based Rupert has run Keyscape Design & Construction with his garden designer wife Ruth Gwynn – they’re familiar figures on the show garden circuit having made show gardens at RHS Malvern and BBC Gardeners’ World Live.

TASK launched its courses two years ago to pass on the experience Rupert and his team of trainers have built up over years in the industry. They currently run around a dozen with more being added.

Our rural skills taster day saw us tackling willow weaving, dry stone walling and laying bricks, with mixed results.

I’ve tried working with willow before, most recently when I made last Christmas’ wreath. Even so, I’m not sure my finished bird feeder looked a lot like the example our tutor Mel Bastier showed us.

I’m not confident bird food would stay in it and it seems far too easy for the resident squirrel to raid. It may be turned into a planter.

My second ‘class’ was dry stone walling – something we have an awful lot of here in the Cotswolds. Tutor Nick Leitch, who runs his own design and stone walling business in Gloucestershire, explained how walls are built with ‘formers’ – wooden uprights – and guide string to keep the wall’s many layers level.

Stone is first stacked with the ‘good side’ uppermost and then begins the painstaking process of matching stones and laying them so that they not only butt up together along the wall but also across the width. Any awkward bulges or lumps can be knocked off with a chisel – known as dressing the stone.

I love jigsaw puzzles but this was a puzzle too far for me and my classmate. The wall you see above owed more to earlier classes than to anything we did. We may not have gained much in the way of dry stone walling skills but we did come away with a lot of respect for the people who build them.

My final class was with Rupert and David Sewell, another award-winning landscaper and former chairman of the Association of Professional Landscapers. The talked us through the different types of bricks, what the dip in them is called – it’s a frog – and why some have holes.

After a demonstration of how to prep the mortar – TASK uses lime mortar, which like all the other materials is reused in subsequent classes – we were shown how to lay the start of a brick wall.

It’s a skill that needs close attention to detail with constant use of spirit levels to check both vertical and horizontal planes. Tap down too hard with a trowel and your brick will pivot up at the other end.

I was pleased with the result – a bit mucky and at three bricks in around 40 minutes a long way off the 1,000 bricks a day of an expert brickie but correctly spaced and, above all, straight and level. However, I’m not sure a career change is likely.

You can find out more about the courses TASK runs here.

Enjoyed this? Make sure you don’t miss future posts by joining my mailing list.