Recently I have been delving into our maritime past and getting hands-on experience in an ancient craft that has powered our vessels around the globe. Our ancestors used what was to hand when creating tools, and the plants, trees and vegetation around them yielded an interesting commodity: fibres from sources like the flax plant and the husks of coconuts. Was it in an idle moment spent twiddling such fibres that man first noted their ability to lock together?

The natural length of these fibres, known as the staple, can be elongated by continuously twisting multiple lengths together - the problem is that the resulting yarn is not very strong or resilient. I wonder how long it took people to work out that lengths of yarn could also be strengthened by twisting them together, but this time in the opposite direction to the twist of the yarn itself? Doing so ‘locks’ the strand of yarn together in a twisted cord; a rope. This amazing tool can be made from 6mm to a hefty 110mm in diameter.

While the Master Ropery may be a historic gem, the skills it preserves remain as relevant today as ever. Stan Seaman, born at Bucklers Hard in 1919, was a rope maker and rigger whose skills were much in demand. After starting work on the Beaulieu River at the tender age of seven, Stan joined the Merchant Navy and worked in local boat yards after the war - he would go on to rig the yacht in which Sir Francis Chichester became the first solo world circumnavigator in 1966-7.

The Master Ropery itself remains functional not only for heritage purposes, but for modern business and leisure clientele. HMS Victory, now the pride of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, was build at Chatham and still gets its rope from there today. There are also many non-maritime uses for the Master Ropery's products, including the rigging for curtains in the theatre industry - apparently synthetic materials would melt with the heat and friction!

Outside of theatre settings, most rigging, lines, and nets used on boats have been replaced with synthetic ones that boast greater strength and resilience to rotting. Unfortunately these very qualities make such items a nightmare for the marine environment and its inhabitants. When natural ropes and lines reach the end of their serviceable life they sink to the sea bed and naturally rot away, potentially even providing a home or protection for smaller marine species; the same cannot be said of their synthetic counterparts.

One phrase you may hear a lot is 'ghost gear', meaning the tangled equipment disgorged into our seas by working and leisure fishing vessels. It is a very evocative name and true to character: ghost gear floats around our oceans on the currents and gyres, pushed by the weather systems, and in its travels entraps, chokes and suffocates marine species from whales to waders. Wild animals mistake it for food, use it in nest building, and become entangled captives. Death can be instantaneous, but can also take years; we have all seen the videos of brave divers trying to cut cetaceans free from metres of matted and knotted rope.

One of the hardest things to decipher is who has responsibility for ghost gear - is it the trawler who cuts free his snared nets, or the council on whose beach it washes up? There are some positive initiatives where local communities have come up with their own solutions to this problem. In Greece, for example, a young fisherman encourages his colleagues to 'fish' for nets; they are paid 200 euros a month to collect and return ghost gear to shore, thereby removing it from the marine environment.

Back in Chatham on a chilly February morning I furthered my own efforts on this front: I arrived at the Master Ropery with large reels of plarn, or plastic yarn. Mine was created from recycled single use plastic bottles - one large bottle yields 15m of material! The incredibly skilled rope makers with some 20 years' experience scratched their chins about this new fibre, but after a few tests we were on our way creating our very own mixture of plarn and traditional flax.

Rope making is a very physical and hands-on process, and has to be done methodically. We were making rope with three strands, so loaded two hooks with flax and one with plarn, and set to twisting. The two materials had very different characteristics, so the natural fibre had been pre-tensioned beforehand.

The three strands are twisted in one direction, and then placed on a single hook and twisted together in the opposite direction; a fascinating process that has not changed in thousands of years. Although made with historic methods, I think that the rope we made that day may be the first of its kind. It is now ready to be rigged into the sculpture for Spiny Seahorses and Ripping Yarns - I can't wait!

Spiny Seahorses and Ripping Yarns

Trudi is collaborating with us on an element of our marine project Secrets of the Solent. Together, we're working with local communities to collect plastic marine litter marine and transform it into an inspirational sculpture.

Learn more about our collaboration