The easiest arrowheads to make come from tin cans – baked beans, spaghetti hoops, anything. The base and lid will be a flat metal surface. Use a good pair of scissors, and you might find it is very easy to cut yourself and spend the rest of the day at your local hospital. Ask an adult to help with this bit. Leave a long ‘handle’, as in the picture. It will help keep the head securely in place.
Note that these are not that useful for target practice – they bend. They are probably better for hunting rabbits, though we found the movement of drawing an arrow scared living creatures away for half a mile in every direction. For target practice, the best thing is simply to sharpen the wooden arrow tip with a penknife and use a soft target – an old jumper stuffed with newspaper or straw.
The arrows themselves are traditionally made out of very thin, straight branches, whittled, trimmed and sanded until they are perfectly smooth. Dowel rods, however, are already perfectly straight and smooth and can be bought from any large hardware shop. The arrow we made is from an English elm, but any wood that doesn’t splinter easily will do.
There are three important parts to making an arrow – getting it straight, attaching the point and attaching the feathers. The old word for ‘arrow maker’ was ‘fletcher’, and it is a skill all to itself.
If you have a metal tip, simply saw a slit in the end of your arrow, push the head into place and then tie strong thread securely around the arrow shaft to keep it steady. Attaching a flint head like this is only possible if it is a flat piece.
Now to fletch the arrow, you are going to need feathers. We used pheasant ones after seeing a dead pheasant on the side of the road. If this isn’t possible, you’ll have to go to any farm, ask at a butcher’s or look for pigeon feathers in local parks. Goose feathers are the traditional favourite, but are not easy to find. Make sure you have a good stock of them to hand. Feathers are much lighter than plastic and are still used by professional archers today.
With a penknife, or just scissors, cut this shape from the feather, keeping a little of the central quill to hold it together. You can still trim it when it’s finished, so it doesn’t have to be fantastically neat at this stage.
You should leave an inch of bare wood at the end of the arrow to give you something to grip with your fingers as you draw. We forgot this until actually testing the bow.
Also note that the three feathers are placed 120° apart from each other (3 × 120 = 360). The ‘cock feather’ is the one at 90° to the string slot, as in the picture below. Use your eye to place them on the shaft for gluing. During a shot, the arrow rests on the outside of the hand gripping the bow and the cock feather points towards the face of the archer. The other two feathers can then pass the bow at speed without hitting it.
A touch of glue holds the feathers in place, but for tradition and for the look of the thing, you should tie a thread securely at one end, then wind it carefully through each of the three feathers until you reach the other end. This is a fiddly job, but strong thread will create an arrow that is a joy to behold. Tie both ends off carefully, trimming the ends of the thread.
It’s a good idea to prepare five or six of these arrows. There is an excellent chance you are going to break a couple, or lose them. Use a little common sense here and don’t fire them where they can disappear into someone else’s garden.
The Bow
Ideally, the wood for your bow should be straight and springy. It should be cut green and then left somewhere to dry for a year. However, our childhood experience of bow-making was that they were always made on the same day they were cut, so we did that again here. Elm works well, as does hazel and ash. The most powerful bows come from a combination of yew sapwood and heartwood, the dense hedge tree found in every churchyard in Britain. In earlier times, Druids considered yew trees sacred and built temples close to them, beginning an association with places of worship that continues to this day. The red yew berries are extremely poisonous. Do not cut yew trees. They are ancient.
Freshly cut bows do lose their power after a day or two. They should not be strung unless you are ready to shoot and you should also experiment with different types of local woods for the best springiness.
The thing to remember is that the bow actually has to bend. It is tempting to choose a thick sapling for immediate power, but anything thicker than three-quarters of an inch is probably too thick.
If you have access to carpentry tools, fix the bow gently into a vice and use a plane to taper the ends. Most ones you find in woods will have some degree of tapering, which can be redressed at this stage.
We cut all the notches and slots for this bow and arrow with a standard Swiss army knife saw blade. However, a serrated-edge bread knife would do almost as well.
Cut notches in the head and foot of the bow, two inches from the end. Use a little common sense here. You want to cut them just deep enough to hold the bowstring without slipping.
You’ll need very strong, thin string – we found nylon to be the best. Fishing line snapped too easily. Traditional bowstrings were made from waxed linen or woven horse hair, forming miniature cables of immense strength. The Romans even used horsehair to form great springs for their war catapults!
The knot you’ll need is a good all-rounder, from tying up a canal boat to stringing a bow. Its advantage is that the actual knot isn’t tightened under pressure, so it can always be loosened when you need to move on. It is called ‘the round turn and two half-hitches’.
First wind your rope fully around the bow end, as shown. This is the ‘round turn’. Then pass the end under the bowstring and back through the loop – a half hitch. Pull tight. Finally, do another hitch in the same way: under the string, back through the loop and away. You should end up with a knot that doesn’t touch the bow wood but is very solid.
As a final note, it is a very good idea to wear a glove on the hand that holds the bow as you draw back the string. The arrow passes over it at speed and can take skin off. Also, we found it much easier to pull the string back if we had strips of leather wound around the second and third fingers. You can probably get a piece of leather from a furniture shop as a sample, or an upholsterer’s offcut bin. Alternatively, you could just wear another glove. It may interest you to know that the rude gesture of sticking two fingers up at someone came from the English archers at Agincourt. The French had said that they would cut off the arrow-pulling fingers of those men when they beat them. Instead, the French were defeated and the archers mocked them by showing off their fingers – still attached.
Archery can be a fascinating and highly skilful sport and this isn’t a bad way to start.
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