The Estwing Hammer

With the ice inches thick on the birdbaths during the last week I've been using this hammer to break it. It's a sad, sad use for a machine of which I was once immensely proud and not a built guilt-ridden, for this is an Estwing hammer, in its time and, as far as I can see, still THE hammer that any self-respecting geologist would wish to own.

Not that I would ever have described myself as a 'geologist' but I was a teacher of geology for many years, during which....

....the highlights were always the field trips, this picture of a Plume School 'A' level group in Shropshire in, I think, 1994.

The Estwing was a pleasure to use as well as a safe piece of machinery which didn't, as happened with....

....'ordinary' hammers, snap in vigorous use so their head went flying lethally away. Before I paid a small fortune for the Estwing - which is why I said I felt a bit 'guilt-ridden', as we could, as a family, ill afford it at the time - I owned a hammer like this given to me by Mrs MW. I lost it or, rather, I made the mistake of lending it to a student on a field tip who "left it somewhere".

So I bought the Estwing in the mid-seventies and used it for over thirty years until my interest in lumps of rock turned from hacking at them with a hammer to understanding their archaeological significance.