FINE-JEWELLERY workshops are, by and large, extraordinarily quiet places. You may catch the faintest hiss of gold being cast, the muffled rasp of delicate filing or the muted tap, tap, tap of a tiny hammer at work, but, otherwise, you could be in a library or even a church. There is one exception to this: when a jeweller is engaged in die-stamping a signet ring.
Witnessing a signet ring being die-stamped is like standing next to a cannon being fired. The process involves taking a bar of solid gold, compressing it so that it is even denser and then stamping out the ring in flat profile. It is this last stage that makes the serious noise, for it requires a steel die to be dropped down onto the gold with massive force.
Happily, the rest of the goldsmith’s work is more or less silent. The flat profile is heated and bent into the shape of a ring, soldered and plunged into water to cool it off. Forging the ring in this way further hardens it, making it stronger and giving it a superb finish.
Crucially, the dense, compressed gold is the ideal surface for engraving the sharp, highly defined image required for a signet ring. Ostensibly, this article is about one such signet ring, commissioned by me from royal jeweller Bentley & Skinner. In reality, it stretches into other areas, including the role rings play in the human psyche, snippets of jewellery history, traditional craftsmanship, mankind’s search for identity and how we are remembered.
Denne historien er fra June 01, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent ? Logg på
Denne historien er fra June 01, 2022-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
