Though looking a little bare without their bindings, this pair of skis are quite interesting as they are laminated(made from more than one piece of wood) and seem to have been specifically made for downhill skiing rather than cross country. The makers, Madshus,are a Norwegian company and it was the Norwegians who came up with the first laminated skis back in the early 1900’s, though it took nearly 50 years for them to take the skiing world by storm ,only to be eclipsed by plastic just a couple of decades later. The Speyside Sports 2249 logo tells us that they were hire skis from the 1960’s and the plastic sole heralds the end of the wooden ski. The bindings from these skis would almost certainly have been transferred to a set of ‘plastics’.