Choosing Your First Bow Guide

I came up with the idea to write this article after reading a message on the club’s chat—one of the fellow archers was curious about horse bows and asked for advice. I liked the brief exchange between him and one…
I came up with the idea to write this article after reading a message on the club’s chat—one of the fellow archers was curious about horse bows and asked for advice. I liked the brief exchange between him and one…
Greetings, Readers… A clean field opens, a breeze crosses the skin, and a bow rises into that light like a living thought. A page turns, a world gathers, and George R. R. Martin’s archers step forward with quivers that carry…
We like our archers graceful, all clean lines and poised stillness. We imagine a certain elegant geometry of the human form, a partnership between body and bow. History, however, keeps its own accounts, and they tell a story etched in warped bone and strained sinew. The body of the true war archer was a thing remade, a specialised engine of violence. Skeletons recovered from the wreck of the Mary Rose and other medieval sites show us the truth: men with thickened left arms, distorted spines, and grotesquely enlarged joints around the left wrist, left shoulder, and right hand. This is the physical receipt for a lifetime of devotion, a process begun in childhood, with boys as young as seven learning to pull the string.
They were training to master a beast. The draw weights of English war bows were immense, starting around 90 pounds-force and soaring to a staggering 160 or even 180 lbf. This is a force that few modern men could command once, let alone for the duration of a battle. The technique itself was a full-body agony. The 16th-century bishop Hugh Latimer described how an English archer “laid his body in the bow,” a visceral image of a man pressing his entire weight into the stave, a human press converting flesh and bone into projectile energy. This was the price of admission to the world’s most devastating ranged infantry.
The archer’s body became a living testament to the bow’s demands, a beautiful and terrible asymmetry. The true, unvarnished history of our craft is a story written in this strange ink of sinew, bone, and poison; enforced by absurd laws; and etched into the very skeletons of its masters. It is a history of humanity’s darkest and most brilliant impulses, all converging on a single, pointed end.
29th April saw a contingent of six archers from The Les Archers Béarnais club in France travel to Ireland for a whistle-stop archery tour of the South East. By saying it was a whistle-stop tour, I mean over the course…...
It is now summer, which in Ireland means the weather likes to behave in more of a bipolar manner. Summer in Ireland is different from the other two seasons – I’m convinced we don’t really get Spring, just a mildish…
This is an updated version of an article I published a few years ago, about how badly the Olympics and World Archery need to diversify the representation of shooting styles. Given the inclusion of compound, I felt it was appropriate to not only republish it but update it too.
As the fictious, famed Chaos Theorist and open shirt enthusiast, Dr Ian Malcom, once said, “Hang on, this is going to be bad.” 3D Archery is not like Field Archery, and very far removed from Target Archery. Each of the…