Montmorency

In August I received the following message from my sister Jacqui:

I am being presumptuous here, but as your only sibling and your only sister and your only sibling, oh yes, I already said that, but do you know if any of your pigs will be having a litter by the end of the year? I would so love one for my new home...or are they an absolute nightmare to make?  Much love from your only sister and vegetarian and great lover of small pigs, Jax 

How could I resist a request like that? I took it that Jax was referring to the two armoured pigs I have made from an old rusted steel fence post (see Mildred and Horace) from the banks of the Thames near Cricklade. I decided to make this pig as provenance-rich as possible with the following components relating to my immediate area or to me directly:

•  armour,

• body,

• ears,

• legs,

• packing material.

These pigs are in fact quite fiddly to make and I wasn't even sure I could get any more of the old fence post, but a recce turned up a short piece, very badly rusted throughout and hanging from the fence by a piece of wire, its job long ago been taken over by the round wooden posts.

The rust was a bit of a worry as I kept on knocking out large chunks with an old screwdriver but the steel ended up looking structurally sound enough for the project and both the internal and external corrosion added a lot of character (the internal corrosion was still evident at each end when looking end-on). Once I could no longer knock any more rust out, I treated the inside and moved on.

I wanted the pig's body to have a similar provenance so chose a piece of fairly rotten fencing rail, about 25 mm thick,  that I had rescued from a pile due to be burned. This was from a little further along the Thames at the edge of two fields. Here is the piece after being trimmed.

I don't know what kind of wood it is. It's certainly nothing fancy, but it's hard and weather-resistant enough to have survived, at a guess, for many decades. Although the wood looks pretty dull here, once planed, sanded and oiled, it shows an attractive grain.

The wooden body was formed in two sections, one inserted into each end of the steel tube: the head at the front and the tail section at the rear.  The tail section was made from the piece to the right of the shallow saw-cut seen above. The head section needed to be deep enough to be pushed into the tube leaving enough to be carved to make the snout. On its own, the wood wasn't thick enough to form the head so I planed one side, cut it in half and glued the two halves together using Gorilla wood glue, then planed/rasped it into a cylinder. Once again my Shinto Rasp  proved invaluable for fast removal of material. It was touch-and-go as to whether the piece of wood would be big enough but I got away with it. There is more character (and defects) in this wood than in the oak used in Mildred. This is understandable given its original use, but I think it fits with the characterful qualities of the weathered steel tube. 

You can see the horizontal join in the photo of the head. Because the grain of the wood used in the rear section is at right-angles to that of the head, I was able to keep some of the weathered grooves (see the second photo) that you can see in the unworked wood. Once treated with boiled linseed oil, the wood has a beautiful rich warmth to it.

The ears are cut from one of my old walking shoes that will have often walked the fields from which the materials were sourced. It felt so wrong to cut them up, but the high-quality leather outlived the soles which couldn't be replaced. Two 6 mm holes were drilled at about 45 degrees through the steel tube and into the head and the ears rolled up and pushed in. I made small oak pegs that I tapped in to secure the ears. 

The extent of the interior corrosion is particularly noticeable in the above rear view of the pig.

The eyes and nostrils were formed from shallow-drilled holes that were finished with two different sized nails, each rounded with a file and heated in a gas flame.

The mouth was cut with a saw at a jaunty angle giving him an almost wry smile.

The tail is made from a piece of brown leather lace and the paler cut end stained with leather dye.

The legs were cut from pieces from a poplar tree that blew down in a gale a year or two ago.  and has been lying in a field beside North Meadow where horses often graze. You can see the gap left by the tree in the above photo. It's a group of trees we can see from our bedroom window and which we often walk past. I've been fascinated with them ever since we moved here in '89 and have photographed them many times under many different conditions. Nobody has bothered to clear the tree away and the wood has been seasoning where it fell. The ends of the legs are sanded at an angle to represent the trotters.

I cut the branch from a poplar tree that blew down in a gale a year or two ago. The tree has been lying in a field ever since.” 

Curiously, the poplar twigs have angular or stellate pith structures, as can be seen in the second photo above showing the cross-section of one of the 6 mm twigs used for the legs. In larger branches the same tiny central structure becomes insignificant among centimetres of surrounding wood; I could see no trace of it in the 5 cm branch I cut.

The final contribution from the area is the packing material in the custom-made box. After the record-breaking summer of this year (2026), the hay harvesting was earlier than usual and we walked over North Meadow to pick up a couple of handfuls that escaped the harvester.

And why Montmorency? This was the name, as I hazily recall, of the water rat in a story my Dad made up for me and which I asked for night after night. Montmorency had a hole in the river bank which used to regularly flood when his nemesis went past in his motor boat. It sounds very influenced by The Wind in the Willows! It's one more way to link the pig to my sister and me.

I now wish I'd taken the time to talk to Dad about this story in my adulthood to refresh my memory. I'm sure he would have remembered most of the details but now it's lost for ever.

The Bangle

When I cut the pig's armour, I wanted a longer body than that of  Mildred, made 11 years ago, but the result was a little too long and I decided to saw a piece off the end. Cutting the armour to length left me with a 12 mm-wide ring of the same deeply corroded steel. It seemed far too interesting to throw away, and I began to wonder whether it could be turned into a bangle — giving Jacqui a second object made quite literally from Montmorency's leftovers.

That turned into the Fence Post Bangle project, a story in its own right.