The Journal

Dispatches from the hills.

Slow reading for slow clothes. Field notes, small essays, and the occasional recipe. Published irregularly, as good things tend to be.

Nº 014October 2025

Picking sloes after the first frost

A short essay on patience, thorns, and the making of winter gin along the lanes above Brook.

There is a moment, usually in the second week of October, when the sloes on the blackthorn along the lane out of Brook finally give up their bitterness. The frost has done its slow work: the skins soften, the fruit yields under the thumb. Any earlier and the gin turns astringent; any later and the blackbirds have you beaten.

We keep a battered demijohn in the workshop for this ritual. A pound of sloes, half as much sugar, a bottle of good juniper gin. Prick each berry with a silver pin — some swear by a blackthorn spine from the same bush, which feels correct even if it is not — and let it sit in the coolest cupboard for three months. It is a fair analogy for our clothes.

Nº 013October 2025

The buzzard over Shillinglee

Notes from a still October afternoon spent watching a pair of Buteo buteo work the ridge.

Two of them, high, riding a thermal off the south face. That mewing call — pee-yeeoo — which sounds always as if the bird has forgotten something. They were nearly extinct in Surrey a century ago; there are now perhaps forty pairs across the Hills. A small, quiet triumph.

We named the house partly for them, and partly because a name that begins with a Z is difficult to forget. Also, honestly, because the alternatives were worse.

Nº 012September 2025

On the beater's tweed

Why we weight our field coats at 480 grams, and why a shoulder ought to sit unhurried.

480 grams per square metre is heavier than fashion likes and lighter than the eighteenth century managed. It is, in our view, the correct compromise for an English winter: warm enough to stand in for three hours in December, supple enough to sit down in without cracking at the elbow.

The shoulder is the harder question. We build ours with a soft canvas — no fusing, no shoulder pad — because we prefer a jacket that follows the body rather than announcing it. It takes a week or two to warm to you. After that it is yours.

Nº 011August 2025

A day on the brook at Brook

On small chalk streams, older rods, and doing the same thing well for a long time.

The brook at Brook is not the Test, and thank goodness. It rises on Sandhill and runs down through Hambledon on its way to the Wey — narrow enough to jump in most places, clear enough to count the fish. A grandfather's rod, a fly tied on a Tuesday evening, and the whole afternoon in front of you.

Refinement is not the same as complication. This is the entire lesson of the chalk stream.

Nº 010July 2025

Why we do not make a summer collection

The heresy explained.

We make an Autumn / Winter and a Spring / Summer, but the second is a quarter the size of the first. Partly this is climate: our cloth is made for weather, and English summers are polite rather than climatic. Mostly it is discipline. Two collections a year is already twenty-four decisions too many.