The Folk Who Roam Fiddle

I've been making a common asset for the folk community

Trespassing in England

England has weird trespassing laws. In Scotland, there’s a right to roam, which assumes that everyone should have access to the countryside for exercise and recreation no matter who owns it. For the most part, it works very well. But in England this right doesn’t exist. The majority of English countryside is out of bounds for most of its population. 92% of the countryside is off-limits to the public. In all but one-tenth of the English landscape, wandering off the footpath, swimming in a river, exploring, and educating ourselves about our countryside can leave us branded as trespassers and expelled from the land. This causes the wild spaces we are allowed into to become honey-pots and in some areas this density of people in one small segment damages the local ecology.

At this point, you may be wondering how on earth trespassing laws links to violin making, but it does. Much of folk music has its roots in our countryside landscape, yet over the past few-hundred years the ability to access these spaces has been eroded, affecting the musicians that makers provide instruments for. 

Trespass is not a criminal offence, it is civil. This means the police have no power to arrest you for it. However, if while trespassing you carry with you, or do anything, that could be classed as ‘additional conduct’, it goes from a common trespass (civil case) to an aggravated trespass (criminal case). The additional conduct needn’t be itself a crime; activities such as playing musical instruments or taking photographs are specifically listed on the Crown Prosecution website as such additional conducts that could create an aggravated trespass case.

So, to summarise: two folk players carrying instruments, meeting in a remote part of the countryside could land themselves with a charge of aggravated trespass, which is a criminal offence and can carry a six-month prison sentence and/or a £2,500 fine.

Trespassing on land that isn’t yours is not a crime. Playing a musical instrument is not a crime. Yet do them together and you have a crime! I feel strongly that access to nature fosters our interest in caring for it. To me, folk players, fiddle makers and the landscape are all interdependent, and it’s this thread connecting the three subjects that I felt myself being pulled to explore through my work. 

Forming an Idea

“I know exactly who you need to speak to,” Rachel, a friend, tells me  somewhat breathlessly, as we stride across a heather-filled moor in the Peak District. “Emma Crome,” she says with a grin of absolute certainty, “you need to speak to her.”

A few weeks later, Emma Crome –who, it turns out, is an award-winning documentary filmmaker– and I waved at each other through our computer screens, speaking for the first time about a project that had been boring a little hole in my brain until I couldn’t ignore it any longer. It had been this idea that I’d cautiously told Rachel about a few weeks prior, and which had elicited such a strong recommendation to speak with Emma. 

As well as sharing names, Emma and I are both passionate about nature, access to the outdoors, and exploring our relationship with the rural landscape. I’d been ruminating on the idea of making a violin that stood as both a celebration of the folk community and an act of protest against our absurd trespassing laws. By the end of the call, we had a plan: we were making a film together.

So, I had a cause, a medium, and a willing ally to document the project. With the foundations set, we began developing the idea.

Rosie Butler-Hall playing on Stanage Edge in the Peak District

A Common Asset for the Folk Community

The violin was going to be made and then taken out by local folk players into the surrounding countryside to be played for the film, that much was clear. But then what? I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the instrument afterward.

It would feel wrong to sell it, too much like profiteering from something I was doing not for financial gain, but it also didn’t feel right that it be destined to sit in a cupboard or hung up on my wall for the rest of my life.

In parallel with this, I had been reading about Open Access land and discovered that any individual can apply to the government to have their land designated Open Access. What if my violin could be an ‘open access’ violin? Yes, that felt right. The violin would remain under my care for maintenance, but I would declare it a common asset of the folk community, with anyone welcome to borrow it for short periods of time to take out into the landscape and play. 

The violin in various stages of decoration

Creating a Decorated Violin

Early on in my pondering about creating a violin as an act of protest, I emailed Nick Hayes, founder of the England’s Right to Roam campaign, and author/illustrator of The Book of Trespass, to tell him about my – at the time vague – idea and see if he would support it in some way. He responded quickly with a “fuck yeah!” and agreed to donate an illustration of his which I could carve onto the back of the instrument. I had no idea how to translate his illustration to a violin, but I figured I’d find a way.

I toyed with the approach of just painting the design straight onto the back, but I was worried that it would eventually wear off – I wanted to create something with longevity and where its character was integral to its being.

Doing the carving itself was the most nerve-wracking part of the whole project for me. I had never done anything like this before, let alone on an instrument. I considered different approaches for the carving itself too: should the carving sit above the arching, or level with it? In the end, I decided that it would be best to do the arching first, then relief cut the carving, leaving the hollowing slightly thicker in the carved areas. The drawing that Nick donated was a lino-cut, and I wanted the carving to have a similar ‘feel’ to it, rather than the historical ornate carvings we often see on furniture or baroque instruments. I tried to make them 3D, but still quite flat and a little rougher to achieve this.

A few weeks before I was due to start the carving, I was at a British Violin Making Association (BVMA) making ‘get together’ week at Westhope College, Shropshire. I began tentatively doing some engraving tests on a scrap piece of wood while surrounded by the other makers. One of the much more experienced makers peered over my shoulder and picked up the scrap piece of wood with a few leaves carved into it – he raised his eyebrows, and I braced myself for what I thought might be criticism about doing something a little too ‘different’ from our norms, but none came. “Ah, you are an artist,” he said and smiled. This guy knows his stuff, so I figured I was on to something.

I also had a brief but enlightening back-and-forth with the Boardmans, a father and son making duo based in Ireland, who have significant experience in making for folk players, and was advised that a fuller arching usually creates a tone and timbre much more suitable for folk contexts than a flatter Stradivari style.

Once the arching was complete, I laid out my design on tracing paper and transferred them with a pencil. I simplified the illustration considerably, as I was worried that doing the full thing would be too time consuming, but I also usually think less is more when it comes to decorative art on wood. I used a scalpel and gouges to define the edges before carving with a variety of tools up to these edges. After this was done, I used a technique of stippling the background area with a punch and mallet that Marc Soubeyran had explained to me when I did a work placement with him. The stippled areas hold more varnish and thus created some extra contrast for the engraving. I hadn’t wanted to go particularly deep with the engraving as I was concerned about the increased possibility of cracks later in the violin’s life. 

Soggy but happy: folk players, musicians, dogs and children coming together for the filming

Creating a Community

Throughout the year, Emma travelled over from her home in North Wales and filmed various parts of the process, bringing with her the Ethnographic Photographer, Cat Vinton, who had heard about the project and offered to document it in the form of photos. 

Emma and Cat would stay with me in Sheffield a few days every month or so for filming and photographing. With the addition of Rosie Butler-Hall a local, very talented, young folk fiddler and Morris dancer also on board as the primary musician to appear in the film, we formed a solid team of four and immediately gelled. As time passed, and more people heard about what we were doing, we began to feel a community already assembling around this fiddle. Emma suggested that the finale of the film should be the violin being taken out by a group of musicians into the Peak District, passing from my hands to theirs for the next stage of its journey.  

Finishing the Violin

Once the woodworking was done, I was starting to run out of time before the final filming day and wasn’t quite sure how I was going to manage to meet the deadline. Luckily, my partner is also a maker (William Szott). He stepped in and offered to put the violin in his much stronger UV cabinet and do the varnishing in his workshop. He did a great job, creating some shadowing in some areas of the violin so that it has a bit of character that suits the rest of the instrument.

The “Folk Who Roam” logo needed to go in the centre of the design, but I decided that the text was far too delicate to try and engrave using the carving technique I’d used, so instead, I compromised by painting that portion using oil paint, with the hope that as it’s in the centre of the back bout it may not wear off too quickly. I popped over to Manchester midweek to do the painting after Will had added the initial ground layer but prior to the varnish layers.

With great rush, I collected the violin from Will some days later (who had heroically managed to oil varnish the violin in a week, sometimes going into the workshop at 10pm to add another coat). We were days away from the final filming day. Thankfully Will’s varnish method creates a quick-drying varnish which can have a set up on it immediately without the bridge feet tearing off the varnish later.

Then it rained… And rained… so the filming was pushed back to September after the folk festival season has finished, as the musicians were all due to disappear for the summer. The weather was entirely unsuitable for filming, but we decided to head out anyway. We enjoyed a wholesome few hours in the Longshaw National Trust café with the folk players having an impromptu session as we sipped our coffees and watched the rain. When there was a brief break in the clouds, we did a little playing under a nearby tree, too. 

This fiddle has been a challenge, but I’m proud to have created something that also speaks to other parts of my life that I care about. The violin will stay with me for now, but once we’ve finished the filming later this year, players will be able to borrow it for short periods of time – I’m looking forward to seeing where it ends up going with them.  

The Folk Who Roam film is due to be premiered at a film festival later this year, before becoming available online sometime in 2024.