Woodworking courses in Scotland

What you will actually pay

The middle price in Scotland is £205. That is above the £176 we see across the UK, which is worth knowing before you rule somewhere out on price alone. Of the 30 courses here that publish a price, 9 are under £75, 3 are between £75 and £150, 7 are between £150 and £300, 10 are between £300 and £600 and 1 is £600 or more.

The number on its own tells you less than you would think. At the bottom of the range you are usually buying an evening or a half day, working on something small that you take home the same night. In the middle you get a full day, your own bench and enough time to make a mistake and put it right, which is the part that actually teaches you something. Above that you are into weekends and multi-week courses where the point stops being the object and starts being the skill. 2 courses here run far longer than that, the longest of them running 10 weeks.

Where the workshops actually are

Scotland is not evenly covered, and it is better to know that now than after an hour on a train. Glasgow (11), Edinburgh (6) and East Linton (5) between them hold 46% of everything we list here. The rest is spread across 12 other areas, sometimes a single course each.

That matters more than it sounds. Woodworking is not something you can do half attentively on a laptop, so the workshop you pick is one you have to physically get to, often carrying something awkward on the way home. Somewhere twenty minutes away that runs an evening class beats somewhere excellent two hours away that you will talk yourself out of by November.

What gets taught here, and what does not

The most common thing taught in Scotland is furniture making, on 14 of the 48 courses we hold. After that it is green woodworking (9), chair making (5) and woodturning (5).

Worth saying plainly: instrument making is thin on the ground here, with three courses or fewer between it. If that is the specific thing you want to learn, you will have more choice looking further afield than waiting for something local to appear. We would rather tell you that than pad the page.

How much time it takes

Of the 27 courses here that tell us how long they run, 17 are two days or less. That is the shape of most hobby woodworking: a day, occasionally a weekend, designed around people who work during the week. All 5 that state a level are open to beginners or to all levels, so a first course is not hard to find.

A day is enough to make one thing properly and to find out whether you enjoy the work rather than the idea of it. It is not enough to learn to cut a dovetail that you would show anybody. If you already know that you want this to stick, the multi day courses work out cheaper per hour than stringing single days together, and you spend less of that time getting set up again.

Who is teaching

21 makers and schools teach in Scotland. The three busiest, Glasgow Wood, Tree Ditions and Gedwood, run 38% of the courses here between them. The rest are smaller workshops running a handful of courses a year. If group size matters to you, ask before booking, because we do not hold it and the number varies by course rather than by workshop.

We take nothing from any of them. No one has paid to appear on this page, nobody can pay to move up it, and every link goes to the workshop's own booking page rather than through us. If a course is full or the date has moved, they will know and we will not, so it is always worth asking them directly.