When I moved out of a perfectly civilised Welsh seaside village, and headed inland 40 miles and uphill by 900ft to live on a four-hundred year old smallholding in the Clocaenog Forest, it was indeed like moving to Middle Earth. Sensible heating was replaced by a coal furnace and a woodburner, it was nearly a year before we had running water, and our small herd of horses had a waterproof roof over their heads before we did. It was still pretty good here though, and we rapidly adopted distinctly old-fashioned ways of doing things....because in this environment, they worked better. Living through a winter high up in the isolation of the Welsh hills teaches you that things you make need to be functional, tough, and durable. We learned to build with stone and create solid wooden joints, bought hand made ironwork, and also got back into the habit of repairing and even making leather items that we needed. For me, it tended to be saddlebags or other bits of horse stuff--repairing reins or bridles, or making mecate straps and tool belts.

At the time I was running an equine feed business, but I slowly got disillusioned with the entire industry and decided enough was enough. My first idea was to go back to writing, but in between assignments, I found myself doing more and more leatherwork, firstly for things we needed, and later on, making things for other people. There's great satisfaction in making something with the same techniques and the same sorts of basic tools that have been used by craftsmen for hundreds of years. For me, it created a strong bond with the generations of people who lived in my house years ago--people who also worked with their hands in much the same way I do today.

A year on, and Elrohir appeared on Etsy for the first time-and was an instant success :) We quickly decided to specialise in making journals, since this was an area where leatherwork and art blended together and afforded plenty of opportunities for extravagant decoration. Latterly, we have begin to produce paper notebooks and inserts for our Travelers Notebooks, not least because we could never find the sorts of things we wanted for ourselves.

Everything made at Elrohir in some way reflects the landscape I live in. 2019 saw us move 250 miles away from Wales, exchanging the half-light of the Clocaenog Forest for the bleak hills and vast forests of the southern Scottish Uplands. It still feels like Middle Earth, particularly since our new workshop was built in the C16th and there is an actual castle next door. I hope our books take a little part of our ancient, wild, mysterious elvish environment to all the corners of the world.

Mischa