Welcome, and Hello
The Restless Forge is- or will be- a working smithy housed on a narrowboat called ‘Murphy’s Game’ (nee MORLAS).
This boat is a vehicle for many things; from the workaday minutiae of any forge- the commissions and repairs- to a base for teaching blacksmithing to others. It is also, by happy coincidence, the perfect means to have an adventure. This site is the means by which you may join in the adventure as well.
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My name is Richard, and I own the Restless Forge.
I am an archaeologist, conservationist, building conservator, teacher, mechanic, farmer, surveyor, welder, painter; lover of boats, diggers, old machinery, Land Rovers, and over and above all of that I am a metalworker.
This project- The Restless Forge- has been bought about like most things in life through the combination of several chance events and an underlying (often subconscious) desire for a ‘thing’ to exist in the world. Over the coming weeks and months you will get the chance to learn a little more about some of these events; some others, I am sorry to say, will stay firmly under wraps.
For now, I’ll start the timeline off with a couple of key events, just to get us underway. I initially trained as a welder and paint sprayer at the old Benford works in Warwick, serving my apprenticeship between 1995 and 1998. Later, I trained as a blacksmith at Moreton Morrell College in Warwickshire, under the tutelage of Michelle Parker and Clive Sanderson. Following this I moved on to study Archaeology at Worcester University, where the interest in historic metalwork which had taken me there was quickly joined by a love for other elements of archaeological investigation such as experimentation and artefact analysis.
After working as a smith alongside my undergraduate studies I suffered what seemed at first like quite an innocuous injury in a car crash in 2007. Unfortunately as time went on it became clear that this injury was to bring an end to my hopes of working full-time at the forge, at least for a few years. My attention was turned away from smithing as anything other than a part-time concern for what I had hoped would only be a short period, but one that grew as the pain from my injured shoulder did not abate.
It was clear that new ways of thinking and working were needed, so as my archaeological career took off I decided to incorporate metalwork with it and so became involved in building conservation work, combining metalwork with stone and traditional mortar repair projects as I learned more about historic buildings and their technology.
Fast forward a few years and you find me here, working with multiple materials and finally with a repaired shoulder now able to forge in anger once again (thanks, bizarrely, to a second car crash some years after the first). I have been away from an anvil for some time, it has to be said. Most of my metalworking in recent years has been of the prototype or one-off fabrication variety, with a healthy amount of repair and restoration thrown in.
Having lost workshop space to a new housing development shortly after the first lockdown, and with the space which replaced it at risk of the same in the near future, it seemed the perfect time to bring about something I had been quietly been planning for many years; a floating forge. In the spring of 2023 I stumbled across what seemed like the perfect craft, an ex-British Waterways motorboat now very much surplus to requirements and lying quite unloved at the edge of a residential marina in Shropshire.
Introducing the Restless Forge as first encountered. Unloved, unwanted; the very underdog herself.
Dangerously, the opportunity arose at the right time financially, and in a matter of moments a deal was struck. Of course, as anyone who has anything to do with boats will tell you, that’s the easy bit. From here on in it gets expensive, and complicated; and that’s how this has already started to go.
This project is still in its physical infancy, if not its conceptual one. After making the purchase and having the survey carried out it was then time to hand it over to someone else to bring it up to spec, through the application of large sums of money and even larger plates of steel.
In the coming pages you can see this beginning to take shape, before the first great jaunt of the project; bringing the boat ‘home’ to Oxfordshire for its fit out as a forge.
The Restless Forge is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
