A chair from the black oak

Now and then the bench turns to furniture. This one began, like most things here, as a sketch on a torn sheet of lined paper — a Sligo chair, after a plain, strong pattern from the west of Ireland. I made two. One is in seasoned oak, pale and warm. The other is cut from bog oak, dug from the Tanat valley near Llanyblodwel, and it may be eight thousand years old — oak that fell into a peat bog before there was a Wales to name, and lay there blackening while the tannin and the water did their slow work. It comes out of the ground near enough to ebony, hard and heavy. To sit in it is to sit in deep time. The same eye that reads a soundboard reads a chair; it is all one grammar of wood.