Jake Keen on making the shale bracelet

Shiny black shale
Some 2,000 years ago, during the British Iron Age, Green Island acted as a hub for trade both within pre-Roman Britain and with the continent. As well as possibly controlling import and export for the region (by means of large stone and timber jetties reaching out into the deep water channels) the island and the surrounding area also produced its own material for trading. Lots of evidence for lathe-turned shale has been found here, indicating that the beautiful shiny black jewellery and adornments made from the stone were in high demand at the time.

For the reconstruction cameo on this programme, craftsman Jake Keen turned a replica of an Iron-Age shale bracelet on a pole lathe. 'Shale is a fine grained sedimentary rock that's basically compressed mud,' says Jake. 'It's very strong and durable but also really nice to work. It's quite oily and smells like rubber when it's worked on. You can even set alight to it because it contains so much natural oil.'

Variety of tools
Using a variety of tools, including some flint chisels that Phil Harding made, Jake first split a block of shale along one of its stratigraphic beds to produce a thin slab about 2cm thick. This was then marked out with a scribing compass and the basic blank disc shape was chiselled out.

'This preparation stage takes about three hours,' says Jake. 'It's important to get it right so it runs nicely on the lathe. I've also got to make a square hole in the middle to take the chuck which holds it in place.'

Pole lathe
After around two hours on the pole lathe, where the torsion in an ash pole is used to return-pull a leather strap wrapped around the lathe shaft, Jake produced a fine shale bracelet with the core just ready to pop out (and looking exactly the same as the Iron-Age cores found by Time Team and in earlier digs on the island).

'Before I remove it from the lathe I can do some of the finishing,' says Jake. 'It's easier that way because the lathe can do a lot of the turning work for me. By using a range of abrasives from flint right down to shale dust, I can get a really fine finish on the stone.'

After removing the work from the lathe and popping out the core, the final finishing was done to bring the bracelet to a smooth shine. 'To get the final shine I rub in a bit of beeswax and that's about it,' says Jake.

Expensive but accessible
'We know that these were popular in the Iron Age because they've been found all over Britain in excavations and on the continent too,' he continues. 'I guess if I wanted to produce lots of them I'd do them in batches, but they would still take a fair time to make'.

'In the Iron Age I would imagine that they would be fairly 'expensive', but also accessible to a lot of people – not necessarily high status, but probably a special thing to the people who owned them. There have been burials found where adult skeletons have been discovered still wearing small bracelets that were probably first worn when they were children. I think from that we can tell that they were important to people and certainly played a role in the economy of the time.'

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