Walking into Robin’s workshop was like stepping back into the Middle Ages. Piles of wood were strewn on the floor. There were wooden stools, clubs and various tools I could not identify. A single shelf along one of the whitewashed stone walls was piled with old wooden bowls, boards and plates. At the back of the byre, where the daylight had lost its confidence, I could make out the silhouette of a woodworking bench. On a table inside the door lay dozens of long, wooden-handled chisels, which Robin called ‘hook tools’. The room was dominated by the pole lathe – a simple framework of posts and beams with a ten-foot springy pole attached horizontally, above head height.Lathes were first used for wood-turning in Europe and Asia 2,500 years ago, but this type of pole lathe was probably popular from around AD 500 and had its heyday in medieval Europe. It was probably developed for bowl-turning and then later adapted for turning the parts of chairs. Robin’s pole was a rowan sapling, but it could just as easily have been ash, he said. The shape and size are more important than the species.