Friday 18 July 2014

Hiding In The Shade

Hello once more, it's been a good while since I last updated this blog. Mainly because recently I've been quite busy and don't have a great deal of time at me computer.

Well since I last updated my heavy bow had a bit of damage so got sent away and was repaired. A new set of arrows, dubbed 'Blue Murder' has been made for it to shoot outdoors, and they managed to win me 3rd prize at Assheton's Early Bird shoot. If you are wondering, why I named them that, it's because they have a blue cock feather, and a group of ravens are called 'a murder'.

Though recently my shooting as been suffering recently at close range, though at long range it's been going very well. I'm not exactly sure why that is happening but I'm sure I'll work it out in the end.
A few things though have been achieved this year. Firstly the longbow shoot at Kedleston Hall is really the only longbow shoot we go as a team, and last year (not sure if I mentioned it on here) but I set a goal to have an archer from my club on every target at the shoot. Being 16 targets that's quite a push to get 16 people from one club to shoot longbow, but after some hinting, and light pressure a band of 16 archers arrived at Kedleston this year.


It was a good day (though my shooting was bad in comparison), and prizes were won in forms of trophies and raffle. You will also notice that most of the archers in the picture are sporting the new club shirts.

The second achievement is hosting our longbow shoot successfully for the second year in a row. Which once again was very successful, the moving boar provides something quite special. So you can see below the team with the prize boar.


Recently I've been having a few people ask me why I took the raven as my archery icon. Well originally it stemmed from my quiver. I chose the image of the raven with the pentagram and Celtic swirls in because I thought it looked good. Since then I liked to adopt it because Ravens like my archery is seen as both good and bad. It's often depicted as a bird of death, as in years past they would feast on the bodies left on battle fields, and in the bible Noah sent up a raven before the dove, but the raven never returned and therefore was no friend of man.Also it was said witches were able to transform into ravens so they could go secretly to their meetings.
But in other eyes they were the informers of Odin, the father of the Norse gods, and his daughters could appear as ravens. Vikings used to take them out with them to spot for land (so obviously had better luck with them than Noah). But even in England they are seen as positive birds, the tower of London always have ravens, and it's said if the ravens ever left the tower England would fall to it's enemies, and we've believed this so much, ravens were imported from Wales during world war two, and during bird flu the ravens were kept isolated in the tower. Ancient Greeks had the raven as a solar symbol and dedicated to the sun gods, native Americans see it as a symbol of the creator and a friend to mankind.
What is also interesting about these birds is their average IQ is seen to be highier than humans, also coupled with good linguistic skills it's thought that they can understand a good amount of human words and even mimic them.
But why I like them most is because they work together as a team for the good of the group, which for archery is what you want. I.e. You want your arrows to fly together in a group.

Though at the moment I'm preparing to start up a home-business in leather work, so do keep an eye out to hear more news on that, and might get a chance to get some of my leather work for your own kit. For those with facebook you can see some examples here: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Mudd-Hutt/126640237370394

So I'm going to close this update with a quote from an unknown source, happy shooting everyone:

Sometimes the way to win is to forget to take score

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