My morning of Archery
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| Robin Hood statue at Nottingham Forest |
How can it be you ask, that I should go and do some archery? Well, the answer is quite simple. In the 2nd book to The Book of Souls, Maya will be learning to do some archery herself and I feel as a writer, that if you don't know how to do something yourself or at least research the subject, how do you tell others what it's like. I wanted to feel what the bow was like to hold, what it felt like to pull back on the string and to loose the arrow.
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| Selection of hunting bows |
A brief history of the bow and arrow.
It took man more than two million years to create the bow and arrow after first making tools. Researchers say that manufacturing the bow was a challenge to early man and decided to reconstruct the steps he would’ve needed to take.
The bow and arrow were made up of a complementary toolset – with the interchangeable arrows working in tandem with the ‘controlling element’, the bow. To make the bow itself it took 22 raw materials and three semi-finished goods (binding materials and multi-component glue) as well as five production phases.
Further steps were needed to make the arrows.
The invention of the weapons was a huge leap for our ancestors, enabling them to hunt far more effectively.
In the researcher's reconstruction process by which our ancestors invented bows - they found that the 'giant leap' in our history only occurred relatively recently. Early man first started using tools to manufacture other tools around 2.5 million years ago.
But the bow was not first used until 64,000 years ago when its invention greatly increased the flexibility of their activities.
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| Leather armour of a mounted Hungarian archer |
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| Mongolian mounted archer |
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| Archers at the Battle of Agincourt |
Now for an impressive - or not - photo of me having a go at this fab sport.
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| There is probably several things wrong with the way I'm holding my bow, but this is my first attempt. |
The whole experience of doing archery has made me realise that there is a sport out there that I am capable of achieving in a wheelchair which has giving me such a feeling of satisfaction when the arrow hit the bulls-eye and didn't fly completely over the target.
