#18thc

This is my favorite lock from the ones we've been using recently—it belongs to a fowling piece and on the outside it's pretty simple apart from that little piece of ornamentation at the featherspring.

But on the inside it has this beautifully sculpted bridle, which gets me just because... no one is seeing that. That side is flush inside the stock whenever the gun is assembled. The only person able to appreciate that ornamentation is the person taking it apart to clean and maintain it.

I'm not sure where I was going with this but I feel like there's something deeply... intimate? about that? The idea that someone took the time to sculpt an ornamented piece for a mechanism that isn't even visible most of the time, the idea that really only one person gets to appreciate it and only by taking the time to care for it, the fact that the only way by which to see it is to make the gun useless—to remove its capacity for violence.

I got some interest on Bluesky for doing a series of videos on Welsh folklore, fables and folktales, so I thought as it’s Bi Visibility Month I’d start with an 18thC fable that Iolo Morgannwg recorded in his infamous manuscripts called Einion and the Lady of the Wood. I’ll do a video on who Iolo Morgannwg was another time, but you can Google him if you’re curious.  Iolo claimed this tale was…