How This Weardale Couple Are Keeping Heritage Crafts Alive
Looking to the future often involves reflecting on our past
Set up by husband and wife Colin and Sarah Wilson from Witton-le-Wear, The Wiggly Path Company, now based at Harehope Quarry, champions traditional skills to promote positive wellbeing.
Colin and Sarah boast years of experience in wood and textiles crafts. Sarah trained in fashion and textiles, and worked as a designer in London for more than 20 years. ‘I moved back up north to Darlington, where I spent all my teenage years, started teaching at Northumbria University, and that’s where I met Colin,’ she says. ‘We taught there until 2020 when we decided that we wanted to teach private courses as we’ve both done lots of different things in our spare time. I did a lot of stitching, weaving and more heritage aspects of crafting and we wanted to teach more of those skills.’ Colin’s skills include steel and woodwork.
They started by running classes at Brancepeth Castle, before Colin was invited to teach stone carving to a small group at Jack Drum Arts in Crook. ‘We’ve gone from private lessons to social enterprise work, to recently setting up on craftcourses.com too,’ Sarah adds. ‘Since August 2024 we’ve been based at Harehope Quarry and we’ve been running all sorts of different groups.’
Colin and Sarah believe that life is a ‘Wiggly Path’ because things don’t always go as planned, but that creativity helps us create our own culture and sense of place. The workshops and classes The Wiggly Path Company run include whittling and carving, weaving and tapestry, slow stitching, woodcut printing, and more child-friendly crafts. On occasion, they have taught classes to children in schools. ‘It’s unbelievable, the glee on their faces that they’re doing something practical,’ Colin says. They also run team days for businesses. ‘A lot of people now are working remotely and they don’t necessarily get to meet the rest of their team,’ Sarah explains. ‘Doing something like stone carving for instance, they are offered the time to get to know their colleagues in a different way.’
Through meeting new people from across the region, Colin has noticed the benefits of heritage crafts on mental health. ‘With these type of crafts, or heritage skills, we didn’t realise at the time but they can have a calming and meditative effect on people,’ he says. ‘Through our social enterprise work, we’re trying to support people suffering from isolation, for example. Because of the nature of what they’re doing with us, particularly men feel like they’re doing something useful. They love it because it puts them in a space where they can forget about whatever troubles might be on their mind. They’re doing something practical, and they have a finished product to take away with them. We’ve had quite a few who have shared their troubles with us and there have been some quite shocking stories. It’s a privilege when you see people come in who may be suffering, after a few weeks gaining a bit of confidence and making new friendships – it’s really nice.’
In a digital age, heritage crafts offer a time away from the screens we’re so often glued to. ‘We’ve got a couple of people who work quite closely with computers and programming and this is the antithesis,’ Sarah says. ‘A lot of the courses have been presents bought to gift an experience, rather than an item.’
Sarah and Colin are working hard to keep heritage crafts alive. ‘Our nation is built on industrial heritage, especially in the North East, going back to Prince Albert setting up the V&A, which was a celebration of British craftsmanship,’ Sarah continues. ‘It’s that craftsmanship that we’ve been renowned for throughout the world, and we’re trying to retain that, and grow it back up again.’
The Wiggly Path Company’s courses and classes have proved so popular that Colin and Sarah have recently begun trialling a craft club to encourage enthusiastic crafters to return. ‘When various social enterprises put this kind of course on, they’ll have funding for maybe four to six weeks, but at the end of that, these people are left with no where to go. So, because of the classes we run and everyone’s enthusiasm, we’ve decided to run a club with weavers in the morning and whittlers in the afternoon,’ says Colin. ‘It’s early days, but we’ve been fully booked more or less from the get-go. We’ll see what happens!’
Colin and Sarah’s hopes are to continue building a creative hub in the Wear Valley. ‘There are some really great makers here, like [hatmaker and feltmaker] Ellie Langley for instance,’ says Sarah. ‘It’s about making sure those heritage skills are perpetuated. Then hopefully there’ll be younger people who are skilled and who we could help to navigate this into the future.’
