TALBERT  MORTA BOG OAK ESTATE PIPE   $280
Talbert Morta pipes are the most unusual of Talbert Workshop's pipes. These pipes are handmade from 4,500 year-old, fossilized French bog-oak.
 

These pipes are seldom available. If you could get one like this, it would list for about $360.
 

Finding and Harvesting Morta

The process of obtaining morta is one of the biggest differences between the creation of a morta pipe and the creation of a briar pipe. Briar is an active industry emplying legions of workers and large mills for the most efficient harvesting and cutting of the wood, and a pipemaker can simply order pre-cut briar blocks by the bag at highly competitive prices. Some pipemakers, myself included, pay additional costs for purchasing handpicked blocks or traveling to the mills to choose their own, but this is still a relatively simple affair by comparison to the procurement of usable morta.

 
What is morta?

Morta is semi-fossilized wood. It is created when large trees are felled or overturned by geologic activity and become buried in an oxygen-limited fashion, usually in peat or clay. The wood is unable to rot normally so it begins the long process of fossilizing into stone. Morta is a generic term used to describe any semi-fossilized wood of this style, but all the morta I use is from a local oak forest that covered the Briere area some 3,000+ years ago. Morta is found in various locations across the globe, usually in marshlands or moors, and varies widely in its durability, age, and potential usefulness for pipemaking.

 
Why are the morta pipes so expensive?

Morta is expensive because it's not harvested by a professional mill that has year-round access to the stock with warehouses of burls and legions of workers. It's a one-man operation and can only be done once a year. When the water levels are low in early Fall, one must prowl the marsh and find each log under the surface, then mark them and return with shovels, diggers, and a crane to extricate the wood. It's a long process that takes a couple of weeks, plus the costs of storing and drying the wood myself over the course of years. Outside of this short Autumn window of opportunity, morta is unreachable throughout the rest of the year. Between equipment rentals, storage, time lost, etc, the wood ends up with a per-block cost that puts the most expensive briar to shame.

                        

 
   
 
total $290

 TOTAL IS FOR SHIPPING AND DELIVERY CONFIRMATION IN THE U.S.A.    OUTSIDE U.S.A. Please ASK for correct Postage, THANKS!
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