The Douglas hurler keeping the craft of hurley making alive
Not yet 20, Douglas man Adam Lingane made his first hurley at the age of 13 with the help of his grandfather. Now inter-county players use the young man's hurleys.
When you leave Adam Lingane’s workshop, come out the gate and cross the green in front of his parent’s house about five miles bang ahead in the distance is the unmistakable white roof of the south stand of Páirc Uí Chaoimh.
The view feels appropriate and cinematic. At 19, Adam might be one of the youngest hurley makers in the country. The hurleys he makes and repairs are used to drive sliotars over and under the bar by Cork players below in the Pairc. If only they could do more of both and lead Cork back to the promised land.
But, you can’t blame Adam for that then.
Born and raised in Douglas, Adam started making hurleys at the age of 13. He’s long had an affinity for woodwork, and his grandfather gave him a few tools that he had to get young Adam going. He had no mentor, “just trial and error.”
Adam’s had a hurley to hand since he started playing with Douglas in the Street Leagues.
“I do a lot of things with timber, furniture making and I suppose when I was playing I gave it a try and kept going until I got it right,” Adam says of his decision to start making hurleys. You get the sense that he didn’t agonise over this: he likes woodwork, he likes playing hurling, ergo, why not make a hurley?
In his workshop, in the back garden of his parent’s house, he recalls that some of the first hurleys he ever made were down in the Men’s Shed in Carrigaline in the company of his grandfather.
“It was me and a load of old fellas, wondering why I was there,” he told me on a recent visit.
Adam is in his first year at the University of Limerick, where he’s studying to be a woodwork and construction teacher. He’s back down full-time in Cork for the summer, working night shifts at Dunnes Stores in Douglas, playing intermediate and junior hurling with Douglas and every spare minute he has fixing up hurleys and crafting new ones from planks of Irish Ash stacked up inside his workshop
It’s a small operation, and it’s a hobby for Adam. One (young) man and his shed, a handful of machines and a rake of tools. But Adam takes his craft seriously.
The process of making a hurley is nowhere near as complicated or intricate as saying making a rocking chair. (Adam made a rocking chair from Walnut for his Leaving Cert project, and yes he did get an A1, although he didn’t tell me until I asked.)
How to make a hurley
First things first. Adam does not call them hurls. In fact he never uses the word hurl, so I am leaving hurl on the ditch. It’s hurley in house Adam, and to be honest it’s the same for 108% of Cork.
Secondly, despite being of and from Gen Z, Adam did not rely on YouTube in learning to make his hurleys.
“I watched them [hurley making videos], there’s a few, but you wouldn’t learn too much,” he says. And, as he says, crafters don’t want to be giving away their secrets either.
Adam is not a platform kind of guy: he works with saws, sanders and planers and not Meta, Alphabet or TikTok. He doesn’t even have a website, but what he is building is a reputation, and it’s spreading in the most trusted way possible: in conversations between hurlers.
The process of making a hurley starts in the forest and felling an Ash tree, but as Adam dryly informs me he won’t start there as he gets someone else to do that.
In his workshop there’s a tidy pile of planks of Irish Ash, which is where Adam starts. He takes one, marks out a template, essentially the outline of a hurley, and from there takes the plank with the outline to the bandsaw to cut the hurley into shape.
From there he moves to a thicknesser, a machine that takes layers off the crude hurley he has cut out, and from there it’s back and forth to the sander and his workbench where the process slows right down and becomes more crafty and delicate as he whittles the hurley into shape with plains and spoke shavers.
“I’d say that’s what I do differently than a lot of hurley makers,” Adam says, explaining how he spends a great deal of time with the hand tools while shaping the hurley, all the time handling and turning and weighing the nascent hurley. Each plank of Ash and each hurley is minutely different, and yet the goal is to design each one to be the same: a wooden machine than blocks, pucks, shields and scores.
“I think you get a better finish” Adam says matter-of-factly about why he likes to spend more time with his hand tools on the hurley. One of them, a shaver, belongs to his grandfather. There’s also the fact that he enjoys and wants to embrace the craft side of making a hurley.
While we talk Adam pulls down a plank of Ash wood, it has a “senior” grade, the best grade you can get. What he points to is the grain and the curve at the base of the plank; those first hurley makers, this is what they were seeing, the rhythm and the natural flow of the plank. The hurley should flow with the grain.
“I want the curve and the grain like that. That’s why it’s [made from] the bottom of the tree. From a hurley maker’s point of view that’s why it’s important I mark it properly. You need to get the first step right.”
Hurelys when they’re mass produced are nearly entirely made by machines, with very little if any of the work done using spoke shavers or planes such as the ones on Adam’s workbench.
Maybe it’s the hurler in Adam or the fact that he’s an analogue kind of young/old fella, but he wants to get to grips with the hurley as he shapes it into being.
Adam admits he can afford to work like this; he’s a one-man operation, working away when he can, but at the same time he doesn’t want to sacrifice the skill and craft that goes into making a hurley by hand.
We need to talk about Ash dieback
You can’t talk about hurleys or hurling without the elephant in the room: Ash dieback, a fungal disease that is killing Ash and proving to be an existential threat not only to the native tree species in Ireland but also by extension to hurleys and hurling.
The reason Ash and only Ash is used to make hurleys is it can take “hardship” Adam explains. It’s light, flexible and has a breaking point. “When you play hurling someone’s going to get hit, if you hit someone with the hurley, it’ll break first.”
These are facts he knows well.
Down the line and depending on how things pan out, Adam would like to make a go of devoting his life to making hurleys, but you wouldn’t put your house on it given how Ash dieback is decimating trees and quite possibly the hurley making industry.
“It’s getting more and more difficult to get [the timber], and nobody knows what will happen. At the moment we’re alright, but three or four years time we could be in trouble.”
Earlier this year Canning Hurleys in Galway wound up, forced to the sidelines largely as a result of supply issues over Ash dieback. Adam told me that he knows of one hurley maker making hurleys from trees infected from Ash dieback, and “they’re going alright.”
“The only thing is it’s a different colour. The hurleys won’t be white, they’ll be brown or blue,” he says.
I bring up how colour change might not be so bad, after all a yellow sliotar is used in games for matches shown on TV, my point being that sport evolves, but Adam predicts white sliotars will come back.
“The yellow ones are shocking,” he says, explaining how players are used to a white ball.
But one thing that has changed about hurleys and will definitely not change back is the shape of the stick. By example, Adam pulls out an old hurley he made a few years back, based on the template of a hurley that was about 40 or 50 years old. It’s closer to a hockey stick than it is a modern hurley. It’s kind of like the depictions of the hurley Setanta used to drive the sliotar into Culann’s hound.
Hurleys have changed because the game has changed Adam explains. It’s a faster game, and it’s no longer the ground game it was, and so hurleys have become shorter, and the bos, the wide base at the end of the stick, has become ever more wider: the chance of missing a ball even for a clown like me verges on impossible.
Kept busy
There’s a steady stream of club players from hurling and camogie clubs around Cork city that drop by Adam’s workshop with their broken sticks that need mending, or they’ll come to get fit for a new hurley. Stacked against the pile of Ash planks is a line of hurleys in various states of repair.
Over the summer months Adam will be down at the club in Douglas two or three times a week between training and games. It helps being a hurler. He’s around hurlers and hurling all his life.
“You need to be playing hurling to know the weight and the feel of the hurley,” he says. And that makes sense.
While I lived and worked in Japan, one of my main journalism duties was interviewing chefs. Overtime I came to discern a pattern to our interviews; creating is their primary means of expression. It’s the craft that matters, not how much or how well you talk about it. You get that sense with Adam. Talk never built or a hurley.
Before we wrap up I ask Adam what it’s like playing the game he’s played all his life with a hurley he’s made. That and the fact that half the team he’s playing with are using his hurleys as well players on the Cork senior, U20s and minor teams.
"‘Tis a good thing to be able to do, it’s a thing you’ve learned yourself, so ‘tis nice to see the finished product.”
