“I don’t play them. I set them out in the garden and wait for the rain to play them.” Why a 64-year-old blacksmith in the Lake District is letting her last hand-tuned rain drums go far below their worth, before her hands make the decision for her.

Staveley, Cumbria — By Alice Fenwick, Contributing Editor

Nell Ashcroft outside the forge above the Kent, where she has tuned rain drums for the last ten years.

Half a mile up the lane from Staveley, where the road climbs towards Kentmere, there’s a stone smithy built onto the end of an old barn. Eleanor Ashcroft is 64. Everyone calls her Nell. She has worked in that forge since 1991 — field gates, weather vanes, boot scrapers, the odd copper birdbath. For the last ten years, only rain drums.

She doesn’t play them. She tunes them, sets them outside and leaves the rest to the weather.

There’s one last batch left on the bench. After that, she stops.

The Piece She Left Out in the Rain by Mistake

In August 2015, Nell was finishing a commission — a flat steel disc with five cut tongues, ordered as a wind catcher for a garden gate down in Kendal. It didn’t catch the wind the way she wanted. She set it on a mossy tree stump behind the forge to think about it, then a bigger job came in and she clean forgot it was out there.

Two months later, in the middle of an October downpour, she was at the anvil when she heard something out in the yard she couldn’t place. She went out into the rain to see.

The forgotten disc was singing. Every drop that landed on a cut tongue produced a clear, pitched note. Five notes, all clean. The rain was playing the sculpture.

The stump behind the forge — where Nell first heard rain play steel.

“I’d been making things that stand in gardens for twenty-five years. Not one of them had ever made a sound. The one I forgot about made music.”

By November she had finished a proper one: nine tongues, pentatonic, set on the same stump where it still sits today. By 2017 the forge made nothing else.

Nobody Believes It’s the Rain Doing That

One drop, one note. Pentatonic tuning means it can’t land wrong.

A rain drum sounds nothing like people expect. It isn’t a wind chime. Every drop is a single, clean note. Pentatonic, which is the technical way of saying it can’t land wrong. A drop on the F tongue is an F. A drop on the C tongue is a C.

In a fine mizzle, three or four notes a minute with long gaps between them. In steady rain, fifteen or twenty, never landing on top of each other. In a proper downpour, the weather sets the rhythm and the drum plays the notes.

“A piano needs somebody sat at it. This one only needs weather. And weather is the one thing we are never short of up here.”

Nell’s own drum has been on the same stump for ten years. It hasn’t been indoors once. When the cloud comes down the valley she takes her tea to the kitchen window and waits.

“When the cloud comes down the valley, she takes her tea to the window and waits.”

What She Keeps in the Old Biscuit Tin Above the Bench

Nell keeps the letters in a dented biscuit tin on the shelf above the tuning bench. A few hundred of them — cards, notes, pages torn out of notebooks, the odd photograph. Most are short. She brought the tin down when I asked to see them.

“I don’t go through them often,” she said. “Now and again, when there’s a tongue I can’t get right, I have a look.”

She pulled out three.

A few hundred letters in an old biscuit tin on the shelf above the bench.

The first was from a woman called Sheila in Whitby, who had put her drum on a stump in the corner of the back garden in March. Two weeks later the first proper spring rain came through. Sheila texted her granddaughter from the kitchen window, then posted Nell a screenshot of the text taped inside a card. It said: “The garden is playing music.”

“That one stays on the top of the pile,” Nell said.

The second was from a man called Rob in Bristol, forty-seven, third-floor flat, drum on the balcony rail. He wrote about the first summer thunderstorm that caught it, late at night, half an inch of rain in twenty minutes. He opened the balcony door and stood barefoot in the doorway for the whole of it.

“He said it sounded like the building was being tuned from above. I’ve never been to Bristol. I picture his balcony every time it rains.”

The third was a folded card from a woman called Maureen in Pembrokeshire, who had set her drum on the wide arm of a garden bench and never moved it since. One sentence, blue biro:

“It’s the only thing in my garden that gets better when the sky goes dark.”

Nell put the three cards back in the tin and slid it onto the shelf.

“That last one comes to mind when I’m tuning,” she said. “You can make things for thirty-odd years and never have somebody put it back to you that plainly.”

Five Things the Factory Ones Get Wrong

Powder-coated carbon steel, cut and filed one tongue at a time.

Five details separate Nell’s drums from the machine-stamped ones sold online for the price of a takeaway.

Why She’s Putting the Tuning Hammer Down

By the spring of 2025, Nell’s hands had begun telling her something she had been ignoring for a while. The fine work — the millimetre filing along the edge of a tongue — wasn’t steady any more. Some mornings she could still do it. Most mornings she couldn’t.

“You can teach a hand to forge a gate. You can’t teach a hand to tune one. Mine are finished with the fine work.”

The last check on every drum — the grey Kentmere stone that has lived in her apron pocket since 2021.

She’s hand-tuned this final batch herself. Every drum in the last run, by her own hand. After these, the hammer goes down for good.

A hand-tuned steel tongue drum from a luthier starts at the better part of £350. Nell is letting the final run go at cost. She has turned down two collectors from Manchester and a wholesaler in Kendal who offered to take the lot.

“I don’t need the money. I need them out in the weather. A drum on a collector’s shelf is a shut door.”

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