Waking up

It feels as though my blog has been in hibernation for a while, but this morning, that came to an end with an early start!

It's show time! The alarm went off at my usual swimming time of 5.45am even though we were not at home. We were in mid-Wales, not far from Hay on Wye, and we were heading for breakfast at the Showground

We'd stayed overnight at the same Black Mountain Lodge as usual and sure enough, there were the usual roadworks en route.

Never mind, we still made it to the car park well in time for a 7am breakfast!

Though I had work to do, judging craft, my Hero had the run of the show. I knew that it wouldn't take him long before he found a place in the sheep shearing shed, where the Open Championship of woolhandling was taking place.

Around 11.30am and with my work done, I joined him at the semi-final stage.

We had not come across this particular competition until last year, when we watched a couple of rounds and found it fascinating. Today, the shed was pretty full of supporters for the competitors, because there were places on national teams to be decided.

The woolhandlers - mostly young women - work in tandem with the shearers, who work at a phenomenal rate taking only a minute or two to shear a sheep. Out on a sheep farm, they'd soon have a mountain of fleeces to manage, which is why they need a great woolhandler to work alongside them. The woolhandler checks and picks over the fleece, removing any bits of straw and “stuff” that might be attached to the fleece before rolling it tightly into a neat roll, gathering all the loose bits of wool to tuck in securely. It has to be done fast - at the same rate as the shearer works - and it's clearly quite a physical job.

In the competition, each woolhandler was working with two shearers, who had five sheep to shear between them. When the signal sounded, the first shearer would get to work as the handler prepared for the next stage by clearing their workspace. The handler in the photo above is one of the few young men in the competition, from Norway. This certainly was an international challenge, with competitors from Chile as well as the more local “home nations”, Scotland, Ireland, England and of course, Wales.

Once the first shearer was three quarters through the first fleece, the second one began, making sure the woolhandler never had to wait for a fleece to work on. Between the three of them, it took little more than five or six minutes to have five neatly rolled fleeces to be presented for checking, together with a clean and tidy workspace. Not only were the handlers to present those five fleeces, they were also expected to clean up, leaving not “a single whisper of wool behind” as the commentator explained.

There were large screens here and there in the shed which together with a live (and very enthusiastic) commentary ensured that the audience could follow the action in detail.

We left the semi finals in full swing and went for lunch, returning an hour or so later in time for the finals. New T shirts had been awarded and the competition appeared to be closer than ever. At stake was the aforementioned place in the National team and on learning that the 2026 World Championship will take place in New Zealand, we understood the fierce motivation all the more!

Much to the delight of the crowd, the title went to the local Ffion Jenkins with a fellow Welsh competitor, Lauren Morris runner up and third place going to an Englishwoman, Hilary Bond-Harding.

Utterly fascinating, fast and quite compelling, I found a video online explaining the skill of woolhandling…

Imagine this at twice the speed and with the atmosphere of a competition…and you'll probably still be baffled why the two of us spent a couple of hours watching such a show 🤣

Once I had returned to the craft competition area to be available for competitors to discuss the results with the me* it was time to make our way back to the car park for the next part of our journey.

*thankfully no-one questioned my judgement or came looking for a punch up!!

We were spending the night in Newtown, Powys where my Hero spend most of his teenage years. More about that in my next post: Newtown, that is, not his teenage years 😘