Sticking with tradition

The art of craft - hurleys: Hurleys have been made the same way for generations, using the only wood that is up to the job, reports Rosita Boland

Here's a question you could include in your next pub quiz: how many hurleys are made in Ireland each year? Think of all the matches, the clubs in every village and town, the championships. Go on, guess. Chances are you'll be way out.

According to Michael Power, a forest manager with Coillte, the answer is an astonishing 350,000. There isn't enough Irish ash to supply the 60-plus manufacturers, so wood is imported from Denmark, Sweden, Germany, England, Romania and elsewhere. The Irish ash, which is what everyone wants, is distributed according to a quota, so that everyone gets both native and imported wood.

Albert Randall's hurley-making workshop is at the back of his parents' house in Killurin in Co Wexford. Or, to be more precise, the hurl-making workshop. "We call them hurls in Wexford, and they're called hurleys other places, but I have no idea why," he says.

Randall's family has been making hurls in Wexford since 1910. "Hurl-making is a proud tradition in itself, but I'm also proud to be involved in a craft which my great-grandfather was doing." He started making hurls 20 years ago. In the 1950s eight people made hurls in the workshop; today there is just Randall.

The workshop is a barn of a place, but instead of being stacked with straw or hay it's stacked with planks of ash, head and tail over each other in rows, like strange sardines. Under this roof are the makings of the hurls that fuel dreams and inspire passions. In the right hands one of them might do magic things. And for every unmade hurl there is an as-yet-unplayed match.

So why does the wood for a hurl have to be ash? Randall shows me some of the planks, which a local sawyer has already cut into shapes that look something like very large Christmas stockings. Only the bottom three feet of the ash tree can be used to make hurls; that much wood will yield 12 or 13.

Up to a foot of the ash should be from the part of the tree that is underground, before it meets the root system. This is used to make the turn: the bottom part of the hurl, where it most often meets the sliotar.

"The strongest and toughest part of the wood is down at the bottom," Randall explains. "Ash is the only wood that's supple and doesn't crack. It's light and flexible. And it absorbs the shock of the ball, so you don't get the sting in your hand.

"Hurls have always been made of ash. We've experimented with other woods, but nothing is as good as ash. And Irish ash is the best, because it's grown in such an unpolluted environment. No hurl maker in Ireland would contradict that.

"I can tell which country the ash comes from because of the way it feels when you plane it. The minute you plane Irish ash you know, because it is so much easier to work with."

When the wood comes from the sawyer - a man called Richard Costello, who took over the business from his own father, Sham - Randall leaves it to season for six months. Until about eight years ago he felled and planked his own trees.

"I miss doing that: it was a very physical part of the job. Ash is self-seeding, so my father, for instance, would have cut from the same grove four or five times over his time making hurls."

The shortage of ash, combined with insurance problems when anyone but a Coillte employee fells a tree in a Coillte forest, means the forestry agency now fells the trees itself, supplying the resultant timber to hurl makers.

Randall receives 400 planks at a time, each roughly pre-cut. "Depending on the way it's sawed, or the wood, you wouldn't get a hurl out of each plank. If the wood doesn't have enough of a turn you can't use it. With 400 planks you might get only 50 or 60 senior hurls from it and about 60 juvenile ones."

He shapes the wood in a lathe that can take two pieces at a time, then finishes it by hand. The offcuts and other discarded timber supplies all the Randalls with fuel.

"A real good hurl is like a right arm to a hurler," Randall says. "If it breaks it's like his arm is cut off. It can be like that. Hurlers get awful attached to their hurls. And they don't break as often as you'd think. Even the county players, most would use no more than three in a whole year."

Do you have to have played hurling to understand what makes a good hurl? Randall played himself at one stage. "A lot of hurlers have turned into hurl makers," he says, mentioning Ben O'Connor, captain of the Cork team.

According to Randall, each county has its own design of hurl. "Wexford hurls are designed for ground hurling, so they have slightly thicker heads." His senior hurls cost €18, but you won't find them in the shops: like most hurl makers, he works to order only, supplying county teams and local clubs. He supplies the Wexford team, but he's not partisan: the Randalls have also made hurls for other county teams, such as Galway.

To his knowledge there are no female hurl makers. He doesn't know why, but he suggests the physical nature of the job might have something to do with it.

So what makes a good hurl? He thinks for a while. "The balance. Every hurl has to find its own balance. If the hurl isn't balanced right it won't sit comfortably in the hand. So you plane it down and you keep testing it. If you plane it too much on one side it'll be uneven on one side. Hurling is like a builder with a hammer and a nail. If the hammer isn't true it won't hit the nail. If the hurl doesn't have the right balance it won't hit the sliotar properly."

To illustrate what he means, Randall invites me to swing a hurl. It's much lighter than it looks. And the hurl feels - how can I explain this without sounding daft? It feels right. And it feels alive.

Next Tuesday: basket making in Co Galway