“My hands are done. These are the last boards I’ll ever make.” — Hedley (68) is selling his final walnut chopping board pairs at a special price. One board for raw meat, one for everything else.

From an old cart shed at the end of a farm track outside Much Marcle, Herefordshire, Hedley Pargeter is letting go of the last walnut boards he will ever make. Each pair is cut from English walnut grown on his family’s smallholding, every board one solid piece, shaped by hand with a rasp. His hands are giving out, and when these 312 pairs are sold, the cart shed door shuts for good.

“I’m sixty-eight,” Hedley says, turning a finished board over in his hands. “Some mornings I can’t close my hand round the rasp until gone eleven. The knuckles swell up and the grip just isn’t there any more.” He sets the board back on the shelf. “Walnut is a hard wood. It doesn’t forgive a shaky hand. I’d rather stop than send out a pair that isn’t right.”

At nineteen Hedley took a job at a timber yard near Leominster and graded walnut and oak there for 41 years. The walnut for his boards comes from the Pargeter smallholding, from the trees his grandfather planted along the lane. Hedley only takes the ones that come down on their own: wind, lightning, old age. “I’ve never felled a living walnut for a board,” he says. “I’ve never needed to.”

Two things ruin a wooden chopping board

The first is the glue seam. Turn almost any wooden board over and you will count four or five narrow strips glued together and sanded flat so it looks like one piece. It isn’t. Water works into the seams, the strips move against each other, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil will close again.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. Rush it and the board looks perfect the day it arrives, then shows a hairline crack a few weeks later. Hedley saws every log into slabs and leaves them to air-dry in the loft above the cart shed for at least three years before he cuts a single board.

Then he shapes every board by hand: the curved edges, the handle rings, the long slope of her shoulder, all with a rasp, a scraper and sandpaper. Because of that, no two pairs come out exactly alike. If the two boards of a pair don’t sit right against each other, neither one leaves the shed.

Two shadows on brown paper

For their 40th wedding anniversary, Hedley wanted to give Hazel something she would use every day. One evening she stood next to him at the kitchen window, her head on his shoulder as always, and the low sun threw their shadow on the wall. He taped up a sheet of brown parcel paper and traced it with a joiner’s pencil.

He cut two boards from that outline. The tall one in his shape, the short one in hers. Hazel, who had been a dinner lady at the village school for thirty-one years, put them to work the same week. “The tall one’s yours,” she told him. “Raw meat goes on yours. Mine is for everything else.” As it turns out, that is exactly what food-safety experts recommend.

Most kitchens still use one board for everything, or two that look alike and get mixed up. Hedley’s can’t be mixed up. The shape tells you which one is which.

What comes off a plastic chopping board

In 2023, engineers at North Dakota State University measured what actually comes off a chopping board when a knife hits it, day after day. On the common white plastic boards, the answer was somewhere between 14 and 79 million tiny plastic particles a year.

Every board gives up a little of itself under a blade. The difference is what it gives up. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic does not break down, not in the bin, not in the ground, not in you. Walnut gives up walnut.

“But isn’t wood bad for raw chicken?”

It’s the first thing most people ask, and the research says the opposite. At the University of California, Davis, food microbiologist Dean Cliver put salmonella, listeria and E. coli on boards of wood and plastic. On the wooden boards, the bacteria died off within minutes and could no longer be found on the surface. On knife-scarred plastic, they hid in the grooves and were hard to wash out.

You still scrub the board after raw meat. But a solid walnut board with no glue seams gives bacteria nowhere to hide, and it doesn’t shed plastic into your dinner.

What makes Hedley’s boards different

• One solid piece each: Sawn from a single board of English walnut, never glued up from strips. No seam means nothing to crack open and nothing for germs to hide in.
• A board for raw, a board for the rest: The tall board (38 × 20 cm) for raw meat, poultry and fish. The short board (30 × 20 cm, both just 1 cm thin) for bread, cheese, fruit and veg, and it goes straight to the table as a serving board.
• Made to be handed down: Wash by hand, stand it up to dry, rub in a little oil once a month. Looked after like that, solid walnut lasts for decades.
• Kind to your knives: Walnut is softer than maple, bamboo or glass, so your knives stay sharp for much longer.
• Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled. No varnish, no lacquer, nothing to chip off into your food.

The end of an era: Hedley’s last 312 pairs

Hedley is 68 and he works alone. “There’s nobody to take it on,” he says. Hazel passed away in January 2025. He still walks down to the cart shed every morning at six, the way he always did.

But his hands have made the decision for him. A full day at the bench now costs him the next one. “Forty-one years at the yard and seven on these,” he says. “My hands are telling me to stop. I’ve listened to wood my whole life. I reckon I can listen to them.”

His daughter Gemma got him set up on Cedar & Tin, a small online shop for makers like him, over a single weekend. “I don’t know the first thing about the internet,” he says. “I know walnut.”

Most of the pairs go out as presents. Gemma says more than half are sent to someone other than the person who paid: newlyweds, anniversaries, parents who say they don’t need anything. People see the two shapes leaning on each other and think of somebody. With Christmas coming, she expects the last pairs to be gone before December.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “In the week the big one’s for raw chicken and the little one’s for everything else, and it works. When we have people round I scrub them both and set them out side by side, and someone always asks where I got them.”

  – Gillian T., 61, Ludlow, Shropshire
• ★★★★★

  “I was a joiner for thirty-odd years, so I gave these a proper going-over. Flat, no glue lines, edges eased nice and even, and the handle holes are sanded smooth inside where most people don’t bother. Whoever made these knows what he’s doing.”

  – Trevor H., 72, Chepstow, Monmouthshire
• ★★★★★

  “I bought one pair for us and one for our son and his wife for their first anniversary. She stood them up on the worktop and just smiled. Ours get used every day, raw chicken on the tall one, everything else on the short one, and with a drop of oil they still look new.”

  – Pauline M., 66, Kendal, Cumbria

Where can you buy Hedley’s boards?

The pairs are sold only through Cedar & Tin, where Gemma looks after his orders. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else. When this batch is gone, there will be no more.

Why only £49 for both boards? A single handmade walnut board easily goes for £65 at a craft fair. Hedley set the price himself. “I’m not trying to get rich off my last batch,” he says. “I want them in somebody’s kitchen, not sitting on my shelf.” The regular price of £79 is down to £49 until the last pair is gone.

Cut on them. Serve on them. Put the short one on the table at Christmas. And if the pair isn’t right for you, for any reason or none, send it back within 90 days for your money back.