Hand Carved Hawthorn Wooden...
The Riverbank Nature Co£58.00
“Wild moments, made to last.”
Wild moments, made to last.
How it started: My passion for local nature stems from walks along the river Esk in Midlothian with my grandad when I was just a young lad, watching dippers bobbing along the water and seeing the occasional electric blue glimpse of a kingfisher as it shot past. At primary school I was in a bird club with a few friends, at weekends we'd walk for miles through fields, forests and by the rivers where we lived — yes, I was a twitcher, a bird geek, and all the other names people used. That was me, by age 10 I was a proud member of the RSPB, binoculars and identification book always at the ready!
Fast forward 30 years: I now live by the bank of a river that feeds into the Esk — not in Midlothian, but on the outskirts of Langholm, in Dumfries and Galloway.
For the last ten years, I've been photographing our local wildlife using the Nikon camera my dad gave me, and making things from locally foraged wood found by the river — including some incredibly rare weathered burr wood and hawthorn, all found within a mile of our home. I started making things in my spare time to create more meaningful gifts for family and friends: cufflinks, kilt pins, bud vases, spoons, and more. As my craft improved, I actually started giving the items away as gifts instead of hiding them in my workshop cupboard. People started telling me I could sell the photographs and items I was making — but I'm not a particularly confident person, so I didn't pay much attention. I just thought it was people who knew me being kind.
Like many rural places in Scotland, we have a local country show where each year local people enter their photographs, vegetables, baking, flowers, and other crafts. It turns out it wasn't just people who knew me being kind: for several years in a row, I picked up first prize for photographs I'd entered, and had people offer to buy the cufflinks I'd entered in the craft section.
So, after much self-doubt, I gave myself a talking-to and opened this store to share my crafts and the moments I've captured on camera of the stunning local wildlife. This store is for people who'd rather support a small, independent maker working with local materials than buy something mass-produced and wrapped in plastic — and who want to help share and protect the beauty of the natural world around us.
My wife and I support local wildlife by feeding the birds, creating habitats for hedgehogs, and growing plants that provide food for pollinators. The sales from the store won't pay our mortgage, but they will help us do more for the local wildlife.
If a photograph or a carved spoon from here makes you want to learn woodcraft, take up wildlife photography, learn the call of a dipper, or leave a wild corner in your own garden for the hedgehogs, that would mean more to me than any sale.
Thank you for reading this, I'm genuinely grateful to you for visiting my store. It means the world.
David
Find The Riverbank Nature Co on social media