Tilley Winter Hat Review
History
I am a hat wearer . Thanks to my lack of hair I have to wear hats most of the time. In hot weather I get a headache from the heat or sun and in cold and wet weather I get headaches from the cold or wet. A hat stops this and that alone makes them a requirement for me.
I started out with skip caps etc but even before I go into canoeing I got a Tilley T5 hat and was immediately converted to the benefits of a wide brimmed hat. The advantages are many. The wide brim keeps the rain off your head and face. It also protects you from the sun and glare. They are comfortable to wear and easy to stow.
Also the Tilley specifically is very hard wearing and guaranteed not to wear out in your lifetime. So for these reasons and more (see the review of the T5 I will get round to some day) I am very pleased with my T5 but in winter it has its weaknesses. The most obvious being that your ears get cold.
In winter I tended to wear a knitted woolly bunnet and that was fine, mostly. It kept my ears warm and when wet was still pretty warm but it did not shed the water at all and the lack of a brim meant if it was raining the rain went straight in your eyes. Also you could not make much of an adjustment to the hat depending on the weather. You either wore it or you did not.
I thought the Lowe Mountain Cap might be the answer but it was too warm, even in the coldest conditions. Also with the ear flaps down the rain ran off the hat straight down the back of your neck. Not good.
Enter the Tilley Winter Hat
I knew of the Tilley Winter Hat from their web site (www.Tilley.com) but had my doubts initially. Also I had thought it was quite expensive but as I looked at the alternatives it was clear that £40 is actually quite reasonable for a quality hat.
The Tilley Winter Hat has a wool exterior which is teflon coated to help shed the rain. It has a size adjustment device to allow you to make minor adjustmeants to the fit. As with most types of Tilley hats it comes in a wide range of sizes, has a secret pocket in the top as well as a small piece of closed foam insulation. The insulation also helps the hat to float if it comes off in the canoe and goes for a swim.
What makes the winter hat really different though is that there is ear and forehead warmers tucked up into the hat. So when your ears get cold you can fold these down and it will keep your ears warm and your forehead. Sounds good in theory but I had my doubts. So much so that I have swithered about getting one of these hats for over a year, a couple of years in fact.
Well after my trial of the Lowe Mountain Hat I figured I should give the Tilley a chance. I did a little more research and contacted Tilley about sizing. Their advice was to go for a half size up from my current Tilley. This was to allow for the space taken up by the flaps. When the flaps are down it would mean the hat would sit lower on my head and this would help even more to retain the heat. I also asked about the size of the ear flaps as I could not find a picture with the flaps down. All I could find was the diagram above (from the Tilley web site, I am sure they will not mind 
). This makes the flaps look quite small, as if they would only cover the tops of your ears. Tilley told me the flaps were actually 3 inches deep which sounded plenty to cover the ears.
So the hat arrived. The size of the brim and the shape are pretty much the same as the T5 so it am happy with that. The hat is much warmer than the traditional Tilley, as you would expect. My wife was / is not at all keen on how it looks with the ear flaps down but if it is cold enough you do not care.
The first real test of the hat was last week out on a paddle on Loch Lomond. It was a cold-ish day but bright and sunny with no real wind. the hat kept my head warm enough without needing to deploy the flaps . So I was a happy camper but they was still the wet weather test to go.
Well today I had the chance of a paddle for a couple of hours on the local loch, in the rain. Not just rain but persistent rain with periods of sleet and hailstones in a strong wind. The pictures of me wearing the hat are taken today after my two hours in the rain
The hat performed better than I could have hoped for. The usual benefits of the wide brimmed hat are obviously still there. The brim shields your face from the rain etc and it runs off it past the collar of your jacket as opposed to down the back of your neck. After two hours the inside of the hat was damp but as the hat is mostly wool it is still warm and cozy.
The flaps do what they are meant to and do it well. After about 20 minutes my ears were starting to get cold. So down with the flaps. The flaps are not very thick and do not seem really windproof but within a short time my ears were warmed up and back to normal. I paddled for just under another hour till I was at a spot sheltered from the wind. In this spot the hat was a little warm. No problem simply take the hat off, flip the flaps back into the hat and put it back on. This reduced the insulation enough to make keeping the hat on comfortable. The wide brim keeps the flaps fairly dry even when down so when you put them back in the hat so they are not really wet against your head. This was the conditions where I would have had to take of the Lowe Mountain Cap and end up getting rained on for a while till I cooled down enough.
When I first got the hat I gave the forehead protector a bit of a slagging. Tilley hats are meant to be worn low on the head, so when I put the forehead protector down it covered my eyes. Not awful useful I thought but having worn the hat in a number of conditions I have found that I have used the forehead protector a couple of times. You do not of course put it so low as to cover your eyes but if you want to wear the hat higher so that the brim is higher and giving a better view the forehead protector can and does keep your forehead warm.
Conclusion
Well the hat does everything it sets out to do. I am very pleased with it and only wish I had swithered less and bought it sooner. Are there areas that could be improved? Yes. The hat is meant to be dry cleaned. This is something I am unlikely to get round to so we will find out how it gets on with a machine wash at some time. The strength of the original Tilleys was that you could wash them in the sink at night and they would be dry and ready for action in the morning. The other thing is this hat has no chin strap so it can blow off in windy conditions but in saying this I have never really used the chin strap on my T5 Tilley (Shhh don't tell Tilley ). However, these two minor points aside the hat is superb. I am really happy with it. Between this and my T5 I am good to go for all weather conditions.
This review was first posted on our forum so if you have any comments or questions post them HERE