11. What about Irish wool?
This morning a BBC archive clip came up on my Instagram feed. It was all about linen production, from harvesting the crop through all the different processes to end up with bundles of gleaming flax fibre, ready to be woven into linen. Amazing to see, filmed in the early 1950’s, it highlights linen production as an incredibly labour-intensive and back breaking process. Anyway, as is always the way, I went down a BBC archives account rabbit hole, watching all sorts of stuff as the minutes ticked by. I happened across another film from the 1950’s that showed a wool auction in the north of England.
I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears when I saw and heard the amount they were being paid for the wool then: 90p (Pounds Sterling) per lb weight of wool for fleece straight off the sheep. Now if you roughly input that into the CSO inflation calculator converting the amount from 1950 to 2024, you arrive at about £33 pounds Sterling per lb of wool. Converting to kg and Euro I ended up at around €300 per fleece, bearing in mind that there is a broad range in fleece weight from breed to breed, and modern sheep are much bigger than in the 1950’s. €300 in today’s money, for one sheep’s wool clip, that a farmer now if lucky, will get about €1 for, to try offset against the typical €3 per sheep shearing cost.
Now, I am a passionate advocate for wool and it’s myriad of uses, however following the law of unintended consequences brings me to something else I am passionate about - the reduction of the labour of domestic life endured by in the main, women. I remember all too well the liberation synthetic textiles brought to women like my mother in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Woollen clothing was never designed to be washed in the way textiles are washed today. They were tough, outer wear items, to be brushed off or aired outside. Underclothes, necessary as a buffer against the rough and scratchy coarse wool used for everyday outerwear, were made from lightweight fabrics such as poplin, cotton, and linen. These were hand-washed, dried outdoors, often bleached, sometimes starched, always ironed.
The drudge of laundry and ironing necessary for natural fabrics was tortuous so the arrival of nylon and polyester sheets, shirts, trousers and skirts that were “drip-dry” and permanently creased in the right places, did relieve women of hours of work. It was not long before synthetics replaced outer garments also, and wool very quickly fell out of favour for textile production when synthetic fabrics, which were easily manufactured without the inconvenience of animals and the seasons, were winning on all fronts.
Sadly this was the final death knell for wool which as a fibre and textile had been fading in popularity post-War due to the explosion of innovation and science regarding all sectors in industry - textiles being just one of many. So in 2024 there is a problem - sheep meat is in huge demand, and Ireland produces 68,000 tonnes per annum, of which 64,000 tonnes are exported. Sheep’s wool will keep growing and will continue to be sheared off every summer. If left on it causes significant health problems, often death, due to the lethal attacks of blowfly larve, which can cause sepsis and death within hours. There are some self-shedding breeds being developed, but without huge success.
So how is the wool to be utilised? Many crafts people buy their wool online and provenance is not known. Many consumers buy woolen clothing but invariably it is not made from Irish wool, grown in Ireland. There are only one or two mills in the island of Ireland that can spin Irish wool after it has been sent away to the UK for scouring (grease removal) and carding (aligning the fibres from one big mat of wool so that they can be spun). This means most Irish wool languishes in fields and farmyards, unused.
However, it is my firm belief that there are many ways wool can be used, and the first way with least expense is to just plough it into the ground pre-sowing season, ideally with time to allow it settle in as an enricher, not unlike what is done with straw stubble after harvesting barley, oats and wheat. The slow release nitrogen from the wool, plus it’s mineral content, it’s lanolin, and fibre, is hugely beneficial for soil health. It stops soil drying out in summer and helps with drainage in winter. It has insulating properties which prevents freezing of top layers of soil and keeps seedlings frost free. However the message has been lost in communication. The focus is on high-end wool production which at best uses only the top 10% anyway, as quality varies wildly from sheep to sheep. The 90% remaining even if that 10% gets sold in wool auctions, gets left behind and this is what I am really interested in investigating alternative, sustainable uses for.
Lower grade wool is great for the crafts of rug felting and peg loom weaving - a fascinating pre-Viking method of making textiles to keep nomadic people warm. It is perfect for insulation as it is naturally fire retardant, and it is stable and slow to biodegrade making it fantastic for laying under gravel or flagstone paths. It is my mission to find ways to get this message through to sheep farmers, because just because we won’t get €300 anymore for fleeces, it does not mean that wool should be discarded and dumped, it is still useful and valuable in other ways.