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.
There are a growing number of people, men and women, who want to reclaim some of that power. To learn some basic survival skills and be able to say they could sustain themselves using those skills and knowledge. It is also very satisfying to know you can do it and often the quality of life actually increases on a personal level, even though the lifestyle might be a regression to the way people lived hundreds, thousands of years ago, rather than the 21st century. Not many of us want to actually live like Neanderthals, but perhaps want to feel they have some of those skills under their belts. So now you know the motivation for living in the woods for a day or two where you can forage for fuel, light a fire for warmth and cooking, maybe find something edible and take a dump in a hole in the ground! And if you can’t see the reason for wanting to do that, then you’re probably already dead because however you do it now, it’s still an everyday requirement of being an animal – sorry human. See you in part two for my first 24 hours in a wood.
