Sand Lathe

These photos show my mum and uncle on a beach in the Isle of Wight, UK in 1948. But how did they make those extraordinary sand castles? There are no moulds around.

My mum tells me they were created with a device my great grandad Henry Ingham designed for them. He was the chief engineer at a spinning mill in Leigh in Lancashire, in the north of England.

As you can see from the second picture, the tool consists of a wooden dowel that goes through the centre of the sand pile, a disc that sits on top of the sand pile and a collar that attaches the dowel to a blade that cuts a profile into the sand. It's a sand version of the ceramic process known as "jollying". I'm currently working on re-creating what we've christened the "Sand Lathe" for today's budding sand architects.