Forging a living in the black art

Only 100 or so blacksmiths still make full-time livings from their craft. Rosita Boland visits one of them in his workshop in Co Tipperary.

Ablacksmith is one of those slightly mysterious craftsmen often confused with a farrier. In general, a blacksmith makes and repairs iron objects by hand, while a farrier shoes horses. Some blacksmiths do both, but British-born Richard Linstead, whose workshop is in Fethard, Co Tipperary, has no dealings with the four-legged creatures. Most farriers now, he explains, travel to stables rather than being based in one place.

Linstead, who has been a blacksmith for 45 years, bears the marks of his trade: his hand is still bleeding from an unplanned connection with a sheet of steel in the workshop earlier that morning. "An occupational hazard," as Linstead wryly describes it, rewrapping his bandage. "I get burns as well from time to time."

Linstead did a five-year apprenticeship in Bristol, straight from school. "I wasn't allowed on the inside of the anvil for two years. My job during that time was to light the fire. That was a time when you had to pay to be an apprentice. Blacksmithing is not about strength. It's about technique: 90 per cent technique and 10 per cent effort. To be a good blacksmith you need hand and eye co-ordination. You have to have a feeling for iron, an understanding of it."

The two most important objects in Linstead's workshop are the hearth and the anvil. The hearth is fuelled by coal and coke, and can be fanned automatically. He gets it going and puts an iron rod with an arrow-shaped piece welded to its top into the centre of the fire. After a few minutes it is red hot and, now pliant, ready for work. It looks so dangerously hot that you find yourself beginning to back away from the hearth. For Linstead it's like handling a snake: he knows exactly what he's doing.

This rod will be one piece of a set of railings. Linstead puts it on the anvil with tongs and, by turn, wraps each of the arrowhead pieces round a scroll; a clamp that holds the rod and allows him to shape the head into a scroll. The anvil itself is sitting in a marvellously low-tech tree stump. "It's an ash stump. The wood takes the shock of the impact when I use the anvil," he says. "Otherwise I'd have no wrists left."

Linstead also has a set of some 30 hammers, 12 of which he uses constantly, each with a different function. These range from huge lump hammers to dainty-looking leaf hammers, used for making ornamental flowers with fancy abstract details.

His most frequent commission is gates, which he makes in the traditional way. They are all hot-forged from solid rods of iron, with scrolls on top. Gates or railings that are not formed in the traditional way will be made of hollow rods. Linstead calls these lollipop gates, as the top decorative piece is added to a machine-made rod. Being hollow, they don't last as long, and once you start examining them closely they do look different. A pair of his 12-feet-by-six-feet gates costs €2,500. He never advertises; all his business is by word of mouth. People turn up and discuss what they want, and he will help them design it.

His other most frequent commission is wedding gifts of "companion pieces", most of which are fire sets. Some come decorated with animal heads: rams, horses or dragons. "It's good everyone hasn't converted to gas yet," he says.

Linstead's most memorable commission has been making the gates and railings for Longfield House, in Cashel, which was once the home of Charles Bianconi, the man who brought public transport to Ireland in the form of regular horse-drawn carriages.

A portion of his workshop is also taken up by dozens of shells and rosettes of metal. These are the ornamental pieces from the railings of Thurles Cathedral, which dates from the mid-19th century.

After more than a century of outdoor service, the rivets and some of the ornamentation need replacing. When finished, they will go back into the railings at Thurles and will probably last another century.

Linstead's house is full of his work: shelves, pot-holders, candlesticks, lamp stands, fire irons and more artistic, ornamental animals he particularly loves to make. "I wish I had more time to experiment."

Linstead estimates that about 100 people make full-time livings from blacksmithing in Ireland. Many of them, as well as others from continental Europe, get together in Ireland every now and then for weekend "forge-ins", workshops where blacksmiths pass on skills and techniques."You never learn everything," Linstead says. "You are always learning."

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