Day two. I woke again around six. Packed up my sleeping equipment before running the gauntlet of assorted flies lurking in the tent porch and emerged into a beautiful woodland setting, just as I had left it. What an amazing experience that is. Like stepping through a universe portal. OK maybe not but certainly not my usual morning wake up routine. Just me and nature. Time for a coffee. Usually this is a two minute job but not today. First forage some more tinder and dead wood and light the fire. You start to realise why we invented modern conveniences. Not because lighting a fire to make a coffee is unpleasant, far from it, but it just takes so much time. Next job – well all I can say is that doing a poo outdoors surrounded by trees and birdsong is surprisingly pleasant. Just don’t try it in your local park though!

Day two was shaping up nicely as I fashioned a cooking grill from a cooling tray from the pound shop and two logs. Sausage, egg and beans and the smell of wood smoke – fantastic (do the eggs look like Pacman or a startled cartoon ghost?)

Breakfast in the woods.

Morning coffee coming up

The rest of the morning was spent pottering, packing my tent up and keeping the fire going for lunchtime. Time for another coffee and a selfie. (If a bushcrafter has a great time in the woods but there’s nobody there to see it, did it actually happen)

Coffee and selfie.

Lunchtime arrived. A tin of soup and bannock! This time there was no sticky, stick routine. Slap the dough in the skillet with a little oil, pat it down and gently fry and turn it over. The result is a warm doughy middle and crispy crusty outside. The soup was forgettable but the bannock was a triumph. The job of keeping the fire going is pretty time consuming, mainly having to find dry dead wood and take it back. So to make future fire management easier, I built a small log store out of an old packing crate and a tarp from the pound shop. Budget building is also very satisfying. I stocked it up with some cut wood.

Leek and potato soup and bannock for lunch

Before eventually leaving, exhausted (it’s hard work and little sleep) but immensely satisfied, I had a look at some of the bird nest boxes. As I approached one I heard a familiar sound of baby bluetits calling their mother. I was delighted to see a tiny head pop out of the hole as it waited for it’s next mouthful from mum. A little further through the wood and a woodcock flew out of the undergrowth. It had been sitting on four eggs before I disturbed it. Dunno who was most startled.

It has been a fantastic two days. I have learned a lot about my woods and myself too. It is something I will remember and look back on for a long time. Hope you managed to stay the course with me. The blog posting has been a mammoth one.

Oh you came back for more eh? Welcome. Day One of my bushcraft/camping adventure.

When I bought my wood a year ago, one of the main motives was to be able to get back to nature for a while, watch nature unfold and go about it’s daily business and learn some basic survival skills first hand. I’d been reading and watching bushcraft books and videos for a while but my first year of being a woodlander, was mainly focussing on getting some essential jobs done there. I wanted to try my hand at them and ultimately, spend a whole day and night there. Having done plenty of camping in my past, it was the obvious way to do it but this time, there would be no luxuries like shower blocks, electric hook-ups, lighting and take-away food. Everything would be down to what I could take, find or manufacture. The challenge was something I felt I had to do for my own personal satisfaction. A lot of thought went into the planning of the trip and this was going to be a challenge on various fronts. Arriving around 9.30 I set about clearing the ground for my tent. The area had been overgown with bramble and bracken last year but I cut it all back during winter. Of course it had started to spring up again and this is what it looked like when I arrived.

Camping area when I arrived

I set to with machete and rake and levelled the vegetation as best I could. The brash hedge would provide some element of screening. By the way, I found a blackbird nest in it but there were no eggs. Either they abandoned it or the young had flown. I added some more tree prunings to give extra height and put up the tent. That was the morning gone.

The camp area after clearing and ready for the tent.

Tent up and ready for the coming night. The porch area at the front was full of flies of every decription within minutes.

Lunch was sandwiches I’d brought with me. No it wasn’t cheating, it was a time saver. I needed to get lots of jobs done before nightfall. Now to build a few luxuries we all take for granted, a toilet and somewhere to cook. I made a composting toilet (basically a wooden box with a hole in the top which you place over a small pit. I made one at home from external plywood and an old toilet seat. The materials were salvaged so cost nothing apart from the preservative. I found a nice secluded area in the wood, cleared the way and dug a hole about a foot deep, placing the box over it and wedging it in place with some hazel poles. The idea is that after using it for (you know what) you throw a bit of soil, wood ash or dead leaves over it and the waste will eventually compost down.

First luxury – like a home from home

Next job – make a firepit and a tripod to hang my billy can and kettle on. This was very satisfying as up until now, I haven’t actually built a fire. I have used a small wood burning camping stove to brew drinks with. It was getting close to making my evening meal. I planned a simple vegetable and Quorn stew with bannock twists. I foraged some honeysuckle bark for tinder and some dry dead wood and lit a fire, hung my billy can from the tripod and started the stew. Bannock is a simple unleavened bread probably originating from Scotland. You mix flour, dried milk powder, baking powder and a pinch of salt in small zip-lock plastic bag. You add water and squish the bag about with your fingers until it’s mixed into a sloppy dough. One method of cooking is to wind a sausage shape of the dough around a fresh cut stick and hold it close to the fire to cook it. Well the doaugh has the consistency of melting chewing gum. Making a sausage shape wasn’t an option. I smeared a big untidy blob around the end and started to cook it. At one point I needed to put more sticks on the fire, so stuck my bannock stick in the ground. When I got back to it, the dough had slithered off and lay in an unattractive blob covered in debris. try as I may, I could not get it to stay on the stick so eventually gave up and threw it all on the fire. Stew without bannock is fine but it dented my confidence in fending for myself!

My Zebra billy can full of stew and my err – um bannock disaster

The rest of the evening consisted of pottering around, sitting and watching the birds (a very busy Great Tit back and forth feeding it’s young in one of my nest boxes nearby) and wondering what the hell I was doing there. Yes despite my enthusiasm for a Neanderthal lifestyle and reclaiming my hunter gatherer roots, slobbing on the sofa watching telly does have some attraction to it after a days hard graft. I watched the sun go down through the trees and knew the biggest adventure yet was to come. A night in the woods on my own, sleeping under a stretched piece of nylon. There were midges, mosquitos and flies of every species lurking between the inner and outer tent. Fortunately the inner tent is critter-proof and I’d kept it fully zippered up until bedtime. One last walk around the rides before light faded was very peaceful. I sat for a few minutes looking at the half moon over my trees and watching a small bat flitting around. “Eat as many flies as you like” I thought. I had no fear surprisingly but I wondered how the night would transpire and tucked myself into my sleeping bag.

Nightfall in my woods

It was pretty quiet and peaceful but try as I may, I could not relax enough to drop off to sleep. Some part of my brain was on alert and every time I started to go, I came around again. The next few hours consisted of drifting, turning over, and over, and over to find that illusive comfy spot. I still hadn’t fallen asleep when the first bird started singing. Within minutes, there was a full choir. I resigned myself to just lying there and listening to the beautiful sounds of these little creatures. Unlike your city birds, they have an amazing variety of songs. Eventually I fell into an uneasy sleep and dream for a couple of hours. See you in part three.

Lots to tell, so rather than one long post that you might get tired of, I’m splitting it into three parts. So firstly, what’s all this bushcraft stuff you might ask? It’s really a word that has been used to encompass a whole host of activities that folk like me might want to engage in. It might include foraging, fire lighting and cooking over it, wild camping, hunting, making useful or decorative items from natural materials, wildlife watching and so on. Strictly speaking bushcraft is what native indigenous people like aboriginals, Inuit, Amazonians, African and native American tribes do but they won’t call it bushcraft, they just call it living and surviving! So it’s probably an inappropriate word but it’s what is being adopted by modern day man to describe activities that are more in line with a more natural, low tech way of living that we have mostly lost.

One of my reasons for wanting to buy a wood, was to be able to practice some of these activities, as it’s very difficult to get permission to do it in privately owned woodland and against by-laws in publicly owned woods 9in the UK at least). Why do folks want to do it? Well, in our present day high-tech lifestyle we have moved so far away from our ability to work with nature and the natural world and to be able to perform basic survival tasks, that some of us now feel disassociated with our ability to provide for ourselves using our own skills and knowledge. Let’s take a basic task like making a hot drink and a meal. Mostly we fill the kettle, plug it in, put some instant coffee in a cup and pour the boiling water. Take a look at what’s in the freezer that we bought from the huge supermarket and stick a premade meal in the microwave. Bob’s your uncle done, no thought or skills required. Some might be a bit more adventurous and buy whole coffee beans, grind them up and put them in a cafetiere, grow their own vegetables and cook a meal from scratch on their gas or electric state of the art cooker.

Not that long ago, before the industrial revolution, things were much more basic and living was harder. Most folks, even in the west, were able to do a whole host of crafts and skills that were essential to everyday living and in fact their survival – grow or forage for food, make fire for warmth and cooking, make clothing and tools etc. But since then we have grown further and further away from our natural heritage and become more and more reliant on huge industries who do all this for us. Once we lived in harmony with our natural world and lived off it with direct contact. We knew what type of wood made the best fuel and light a fire, what was safe to eat from the hedgerow, how to skin an animal and cook it, how to adapt and improvise tools and small luxuries using our hands and natural materials. We are still part of nature but we have become apart from nature. That goes against the grain with many people. We have given up and lost our ability to support ourselves and with that, if you think sensitively about it, there is a sterility in our lives now and a feeling of helplessness and loss of power to be able to look after ourselves if push comes to shove and we find ourselves needing to support our lives directly from that which is growing around us.