Making Pipes From Morta

Making pipes from morta differs from making them from briar most of all in where and how the raw material comes from. Briar blocks can be ordered already cut, sorted, and dried; morta, on the other hand, is a trunk that small crews dig out of a bog by hand, that must be rested for years, and most of which is lost to waste.

This trio of bottlenecks — limited extraction permits, long drying, and high wastage — has kept morta pipe-making a small-scale field that relies almost entirely on hand labor.

Extraction From the Bog

The morta source most often cited in pipe-making is the Brière bog in France's Loire-Atlantique region. The roughly seven-thousand-hectare area known as the Grande Brière Mottière is held in common by twenty-one communes; a syndicate commission established in 1838, together with the Brière Regional Nature Park, sets who may extract how much and on what dates through annual agreements. Because water only recedes in autumn, the window is narrow: under current rules, September 15 to October 30 — close to six weeks a year. No heavy machinery is allowed on the site. Prospectors probe the ground by driving a long metal skewer into the peat; when the skewer strikes a solid mass, the spot is marked, and the trunk's boundaries are traced through successive probing. Extraction is done with a shovel and spade, the trunk is cut into portable pieces, and the pit is refilled and its top layer replaced the same day. Records note trunks found at depths exceeding a meter. Only ten to twenty percent of the wood extracted turns out to be workable.