A modern knife built with materials from the time when knives didn't even exist...
Sometimes, in our wanderings, we stumble across an extraordinary piece of craftsmanship. Like here. Just south of Brittany, where the Loire River discharges its water into the Atlantic Ocean, you will find a forty-thousand-hectare nature reserve called Parc de Brière. Its core consists of seven thousand hectares of marshy land. A veritable no man's land, boggy, vast and deserted. Habitat for birds and insects. And ahead, a few naturalists. But this also turns out to be the terrain where Atelier JHP's treasure hunters make their move....
ON THE HUNT
A few times a year, you can find them there. In prepared Landrovers, they slowly make their way through the unpredictable landscape. When a car sinks to its axles and even four-wheel drive in low gearing leaves no way out, profiled metal grates and winches are used to force a way out.
IN THE MODDER
As soon as they reach a promising piece of ground, they get out and turn their thin augers into the soft soil. After several hours of searching, they hit it. With combined forces, shovels and pickaxes, an elongated hole is dug into the mud. A hoisting rig, consisting of three poles and a hoist, is set up. Through these, the steel cable of the winch on the nose of the Landrover is guided. And then the heavy lifting can begin.
ESTABLISHED WOOD
What is put dripping and well into a trailer moments later is a huge piece of bog oak or morta, a petrified oak tree that fell over and sank into the swamp thousands of years ago. Cut off from oxygen, the wood mummified and eventually turned into a massive and loooong fossil.
HANDCRAFTED
Once arrived at Atelier JHP -the workshop of Jean-Henry Pagnon in the hamlet of Saint André des Eaux, not far from the marshes- the brown-black morta is chopped into smaller pieces. The finest parts are selected and patiently worked into solid handles of artisan-forged knives. The blade bears a powerful M and the name Morta, a reference to the primal material.
Jean-Henry Pagnon:
"Our Morta knife, of course, is characterised mainly by the use of the noble material we get from the Brière marshes. This makes the new knives some 5,000 years old at the same time. They harbour a history dating back to the Neolithic, the period before the Bronze Age, the time when the first metal knives were made. It gives them a unique character. I come up with the design of the knives myself. But based on prototypes, we decide as a team what they will eventually look like. Our customers are diverse. Young, old, retired, couples... But they have one thing in common: their love of beautiful things. 2020 was a difficult year for us. Not because we had no work because of the covid crisis. On the contrary. We struggled to meet demand. Making a knife takes a lot of time and the material we work with is scarce. We were regularly sold out. In total, we were able to make about 2,500 knives during the year with our small team. But for 2021, we are well prepared: we went into the swamps more often and stocked up on morta. Provided the health situation allows, we can now make every customer happy..."
Check also: couteaux-morta.com
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