The straps go through the wales at top and bottom- loop on the inside, each strap is a single piece of leather with a buckle. The wales were put on to make those parts of the backpack strong enough to cope.
I am planning to use one of my old external framed backpacks to make a backpack-basket. Basically using the aluminium frame as the basket frame and weaving directly onto it. Would be an interesting experiment, the backpack is woven onto a Catalan tension base (which is a framed base), so it should work- basically make the backpack frame lower ledge into the base frame, build a tension base onto it then weave up. If it's made with brown (bark-on) willow it should be fairly water resistant, and a coating of natural wax/oil of some sort once finished would no doubt enhance that.
The Cyntell (Gwyntell) basket was made with willow.... and is a very specific weave and style..... depends where you are in Wales I guess, certainly the Cyntell is a traditional SW Wales basket. (Sometimes the main ribs are made with hazel but it's woven with willow).
I suspect we had a lot more traditional forms of willow basket in days gone by, but few survived in England/Wales after the industrialisation of willow weaving underpinned by the coming of the railway- only the stuff that was made by the "professional" survived and the stuff made locally was replaced by mass produced baskets brought in by railway. So we moved to buff and white willow baskets made in mass production workshops- whereas in rural areas, agricultural baskets would have been made with whatever was to hand.
If you can find a copy of Joe Hogan's book about baskets in Ireland, it's very interesting, as the rural/local tradition seemed to have survivied much longer there, and he describes a great variety of materials/techniques used to make local baskets. Some have parallels in Wales- e.g. a form of agricultural basket uses the Cyntell weave.
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