It’s been difficult to find time to get to the woods the last few weeks so I was looking forward to my visit. I find that if I have long breaks between visits, I start to lose some of the special connection I feel to it. It starts to feel detached from me, somehow remote and I don’t like that. So when I do visit, it sort of re-establishes that connection. The day was dull but dry and I arrived nice and early at 8am. Two other woodlanders arrived at the same time which was nice just to touch base with them. My aims were primarily to cut, split and stack more of my huge pile of logs left from felling last winter and have a little “play” at my bushcraft. My usual initial walkabout discovered some recent and shocking grey squirrel activity. They chew the bark off smooth barked trees. This one has been ring-barked by them since I was last there. It annoyed and saddened me becuase it’s a beautiful straight-trunked beech tree, probably 60+ years old and it is likley to die now.

I spent a good part of the day on the log splitting jobs. There are two piles and I decided to start on the smallest, a pile of longish lengths that first needed chainsawing down to smaller pieces ready for chopping. As I lifted them off, a small brown mousey animal jumped out and disappeared into the bramble in a flash. I found a pile of fluffy material that must have been it’s nest. I couldn’t just pile the logs back up in case there were babies in it that might get crushed so I carefully started to poke around in it. There was a squirmey movement and out popped a small toad, then another. Clearly this pile had become an animal hotel. I cut some logs into smaller sections and built a smaller version, more like an animal bungalow, so they can continue using it for shelter. The other log pile is huge and I keep chipping away at it. The stack is growing nicely but still a lot left to process.

I found a bargain piece of kit at a car boot sale last week. A swedish army M40 mess kit for the huge sume of £3. It’s quite a large bulky item but very versatile. It consists of a brass Trangia spirit burner, a wind shield-cum-burner-holder, a largish billy can, a smaller one that is also a mess tin and lid and a plastic bottle for the spirit fuel. So I took that to give it a try out and have a brew with. It took about 10 minutes to boil a mug full of water. It is smoke and soot free and the fuel is cheap enough. I like it and it will probably get used regularly at the woods as a simple and clean method when I can’t be bothered making a fire. The mess tin has a couple of D rings on the short handle. They are so you can insert a stick to extend it and avoid burning your hand – neat eh?

My other bushcraft exercise was to have a go at making nettle cordage – a traditional country craft. You take a long stalk, strip the leaves then smack the stem on a solid surface with something to crush and split it. You can then seperate out the hard brittle core from the fibrous part which is then twisted in a special way to make a type of string. My results were – well, crap to be honest but it was fun to have a go. I need to consult my bushcraft mate who is an expert in such things.

I’ve made some good progress with my shelter over the last few visits. The roof is on (though I might need to upgrade the cheapo tarp I used.) The back and one side is partially complete but I need to add more logs/branches to cover some of the gaps. At least it’s waterproof enough now to use if a sudden shower catches me and I’m quite pleased with it. It’s an ongoing project and time consuming, collecting the dead branches from around the woods so I just have to be patient and keep doing a bit each time.