Artisans of Dartmoor - Book - Page 45
LEFT: Jessie stretches and soften a red deer skin
over the warmth of a firepit at her workshop.
TOP: Hides from common fallow deer, humanely
shot as part of local reforestation efforts.
BOTTOM: A vintage tool which Jessie uses to
push soaking solution out of hides.
traditional British techniques were largely lost during
industrialisation,” she says.
Her product range includes clothes, bags, rugs, and
bone and antler jewellery, along with bespoke rawhide
drumskins for the moor’s shaman community and furs and
leathers for other makers. She is also a regular guest teacher
on survival courses, and runs her own workshops in which
she teaches, among other things, tanning and deer folklore.
Intent on avoiding the health, environmental and
animal welfare issues surrounding the chemical leather
industry, Jessie repurposes hides that would otherwise
go to waste. She uses roadkill, the skins of animals culled
for local woodland regeneration schemes (mostly deer
and rabbits), and redundant fish, which she collects from
Plymouth docks. “I’m making use of things that would
otherwise be disposed of,” says Jessie. “If I didn’t use
these skins, they’d be incinerated, which has a negative
environmental impact. I’m very frugal, so making a living
from turning waste into something beautiful, durable and
valuable is a dream.”
To keep her methods completely natural and faithful to
ancient techniques, Jessie tans her skins using tree bark,
which she strips from newly felled Dartmoor oak or spruce
trees and then boils to extract the tannins. An extremely
labour-intensive and time-consuming process, oak-bark
tanning is practised by only a handful of people in the UK
and is currently classed as a ‘critically endangered’ trade by
Heritage Crafts.
If you’re squeamish look away now – Jessie also uses deer
brains for tanning, a grisly process that requires whisking
them to a pulp, then boiling them to make an oily ‘brain
tea’. While bark tanning results in thick, water-resistant
leather for shoes, belts and furniture, this produces soft,
flexible leather suitable for clothing. Both methods
transform animal skins into a useable, preserved state.
Jessie works in a red-brick stable in the courtyard of
an old farmstead, where a large-scale environmental
regeneration project is under way. Inside, against the
left-hand wall, tawny and white spotted fallow deer furs
are piled high, encrusted in salt to preserve them before
tanning. Floor space in her workshop is mostly given over
The Hide Tanner • Jessie Watson Brown
45
