It has often been said that the natural colours of the Herdwick wool are too lovely to be stuck up the chimney. I agree.

Back in 2017 I went out to Austria to meet the company that invented Ionic Protect, to beg and plead with them to moth-proof our Herdwick wool that we use for the Chimney Sheep®. Previously, we had been using borax, but I wasn’t happy about that for various reasons. I’d heard about the Ionic Protect plasma treatment, and, intrigued, asked them to send me some samples. It looked like wool. It smelled like wool. It performed like wool. But the pernicious wool moth no longer recognised it as wool and flew on by to find other woollens to devour.

The company wanted me to use their own felt but it was too soft to be suitable for the Chimney Sheep®. I tried A LOT of different wools when I was developing it, and it was the hardy Herdwick with probably the coarsest wool in the world that was the most suitable. The Chimney Sheep® is deliberately low-tech, and I didn’t want to complicate it by incorporating a wire mesh or additional structure or material. If the wool has the wiry properties inherent in it, then it doesn’t need anything more adding to it.

I love visiting factories and after seeing how the moth-proofed felt was made, I peered round the corner to discover another huge space full of old-fashioned spinning machines, looms, and staff skilfully weaving rugs by hand. They spun the wool to be extra thick then wove it into chunky heavy rugs. “Cor that would be brilliant if we could make Herdwick rugs,” I thought to myself, but the focus was on Herdwick felt and they kindly said that if I could send them a minimum of 5 tons at a time, they would process it into moth-proofed high-quality felt. So began Operation Wool, and the start of my annual Wool Stress, but that’s another story.

That image of the rugs stayed with me though, and a while later I asked about these. They experimented with the Herdwick wool but this on its own didn’t have the right properties. It needed to be mixed with another finer wool to make it work. I sent them some other Lake District wools, and the one that worked the best was Texel, a stocky lowland sheep. And so the T’Yan rug was born: t’yan means “two” in the local dialect.

They have been much admired and we have had excellent reviews of them. When it came to getting another batch made, there was the option to have the wool moth-proofed prior to spinning it. It makes them a little more expensive, but having a moth-proofed rug is a game changer. I have wool rugs in my house that are lovely but I have to spray them with Pistal every season to make sure that the varmints don’t chew them to pieces.

The Ionic Protect process changes the ionic charge of the fibre. There are no chemicals, no poison that will leach out, no synthetic nasties….The wool moth just doesn’t realise it’s wool. It’s permanent. We’ve been treating our Chimney Sheep this way since 2018 and we haven’t had one complaint about moths since then. The borax-treated Chimney Sheep rely on the moth larvae eating a tiny portion in order to be affected by it, so of course, if there are a lot of larvae all eating a tiny portion, there is still damage.

We still have some of the original rugs in stock, so we are listing these side by side with the moth-proofed ones. They are still lovely and excellent rugs, just not magicked with moth-proofingness. Another thing we have in this delivery that I am very happy about: samples! We get a lot of requests for samples but we couldn’t chop up one of our lovely expensive rugs to send out for samples, plus they would have come unwoven in the process, so we have had a batch made specially to send out. They make a lovely mat in their own right as well.

If you treat yourself to one of our rugs, not only will you be introducing a lovely long-lasting piece of the Lake District into your home, you will also be helping the Cumbrian farmers by creating demand for a valued product made of Herdwick wool (and helping me combat Wool Stress!!). Each rug contains several sheep’s worth of fleeces – the extra-large contains the wool of 15 sheep and is like bringing home an entire flock!  Thank you 😊