Category: Outdoor Living Skills

Take a walk on the wildside

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Berkshire Life and Buckinghamshire Life Magazine with Venetia Hawkes

Great to be featured in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire Life Magazines in an article written by Venetia Hawkes. Venetia spent a day with me researching this article for the magazine, finding out what it’s really like to live outdoors in the wild woods. Sitting around the campfire, we spoke about how I got started and where I learnt to be a woodsman. We whittled spoons and baked bread while talking about foraging, campfires and living in the woods, a lovely day, thank you Venetia! Continue reading “Take a walk on the wildside”

What is Bushcraft?

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So just what is Bushcraft? In a literal sense, it’s the skills required to live in the bush. The bush being a commonly used term to describe an area of wild country, one that is remote and does not generally have much if any habitation.

Living in the bush could be just the construction of a shelter, building of a fire and finding water and food. Whilst these are clearly important priorities, they are the bear essentials, they are more about surviving rather than really living. Living is more than just surviving (I hope you agree), so the skills required to live will extend beyond these basics as well as expanding upon them to make life comfortable and enjoyable, whilst living away from the conveniences of modern life. Continue reading “What is Bushcraft?”

That’s a useful knife for feather sticks!

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Arguably the most useful useful piece of equipment to have when living outdoors is a knife. Sure you can improvise, perhaps using a piece of flint, having first knapped it into shape, but from a practical point of view a good knife is an essential.

There is much debate about what makes for a good knife and there are as many opinions as there are knives available, probably more! So having taken a pragmatic view on a selection of knives, the aim is to consider their merits of each for creating feather sticks – a stick that has been finely sliced to create curls of wood used for lighting a campfire (examples of curly feather sticks below). Continue reading “That’s a useful knife for feather sticks!”