The wonderful Balinese art of weaving geringsing

This lovely cotton fabric, woven in the privacy of the villagers' homes, is produced by a method so complex that it takes three to six months and enormous patience to weave one length of geringsing.

Eastern Bali, heading northeast towards the volcanos and wild countryside. Coming round a bend, a view of rice fields: an enchanting spectacle with a myriad shades of green - an astonishing green, soft yet bright.

Now here's the village of Tenganan. There are no cars here, no shop signs, no colourful stalls. It feels true, authentic. This village with its big thatched roofs and perfectly geometric layout is the island's oldest settlement: it has been inhabited since the megalithic era. Small houses face each other and their entrances, often beautifully decorated, are so narrow that only one person can pass through at a time. In the main street, a straight north-south concourse, there are large communal pavilions.

One of these is the community hall where the entire population can get together to discuss issues of village life, following immutable rules. But the people of Tenganan possess a centuries-old treasure. How have they preserved it? Perhaps it is because they belong to the Bali Aga, the island's original population from the time of the Kingdom of Pejang, or because they remained entirely self-sufficient, tucked away in their valley, until the 1980s. Their treasure is the art of weaving geringsing, a skill almost unique in the world, passed down from generation to generation.

This lovely cotton fabric, woven in the privacy of the villagers' homes, is produced by a method so complex that it takes three to six months and enormous patience to weave one length of geringsing. The technique is called 'double ikat'. Bundles of yarn are tie-dyed, before weaving, in a very precise manner that determines the pattern that will emerge in the cloth. The incredibly nimble-fingered village women must reconstitute the pattern thread by thread, placing each one in exactly the right position, like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle.

Bundles of yarn are bound tight at intervals, soaked in a tub of dye and dried in the sun. Then some of the bindings are removed and the yarn is dyed again in another colour. The colours, always red, brown and yellow, come from natural plant and mineral pigments. The red comes from mengkudu, a tropical shrub known for its foul-smelling fruit. Ikat is practised in Asia, Africa and Central America, but in most cases only the threads running in one direction are pattern-dyed. Usually, it is the warp yarn (the lengthwise threads that are stretched on the loom first) that is pattern-died, the weft threads being dyed a solid colour. What's special about double ikat and geringsing is that both warp and weft threads are tie-dyed in advance.

The weaver must make thousands of coloured threads match up precisely. Millimetre by millimetre the pattern emerges before your eyes, as if by magic.

These precious cloths are then placed in the care of the village chief, but they do not belong to him. The Tengananese hold their goods in common, sharing the land and all the products of their labour. The geringsing, neatly folded, are kept in a small cupboard and brought out only for ritual ceremonies in the village. For the Tengananese, these cloths have magical properties: they protect the village and its people from external dangers. So they are central to the rites of passage that mark life's major stages. Children first come in contact with a geringsing at their ritual haircut. The hair is cut and placed on the folded cloth. This cloth with its protective properties will accompany each Tengananese for the collective rituals essential to village life, keeping danger at bay but also symbolising a community united around beneficial traditions.

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