A Bad Workman Blames His Tools!

In the first of a new mini-series, Kevin Alviti looks at the tools that have made themselves indispensable on the smallholding through the centuries and into 2020

- Kevin Alviti

There is something strangely satisfying about using the right tool for a certain job. And the tools that create this feeling didn’t happen by accident — they have been shaped, honed and altered over centuries through daily use.

To get to this point hasn’t been easy, but tools formed a key part of man’s evolution, allowing us to reach the heady heights of the top of the food chain. The ability to use tools multiplied our strengths and minimised our weaknesses. Killing an animal with a spear was much easier (and most likely safer) than with your bare hands, and chopping down a tree to make shelter was only possible with the aid of tools.

The oldest tool to have been discovered, aged 2.6 million years, was a stone axe in Ethiopia. Although this early axe would be a far cry from what we use now, the very fact that even a child would recognise it for what it is shows what importance hand tools still have in our modern society and to those who use them.

As ever more jobs become automated, hand tools will still have their place. An excavator might be the best way to dig footings for a house, but there will always be a banksman with a shovel or a spade to tidy up the trench. A tree surgeon might use a chainsaw to chop down a tree in a suburban garden, but you can bet your bottom dollar that a landscaping rake will be used on the clear up.

You have to use the right tool for the job, though, and that can create some real tool pedants out there in terms of the people who use them every day. If you’ve ever corrected anyone for saying a spade when they should have said a shovel, you’re probably among them!