Yesterday was another visit with the unexpected. I planned to do more brushcutting but having had a hectic and stressful week, decided just to go and relax a little, play in the woods and build a fireplace next to my work area where my bench and seat are. This will be the third fire location, one being at my camping area (mainly used in summer) and the other at my shelter (winter). This one will be for small quick fires when I want to make coffee the bushcraft way and get a bit of a warm when it’s very cold.
Arriving around 8.30 I decided to start off with a walk around the wider woods. I could smell a vague hint of woodsmoke and wondered who was already there enjoying a fire. I checked a couple of the other sites but found no-one. I could see bluish smoke further way to the edge of the woods so decided to head there, purely out of curiosity. When I got there, a smouldering fire was burning in the undergrowth and had covered an area about 50 square metres. It was clearly a wild fire, not intentional and small flames kept breaking out as the breeze fanned it onto the dead bracken and pine needles. I knew who the owner was an rang him and waited till he arrived with water. It hardly made an impact and he was going to have to make several trips with more. I’m not sure whether an intruder had started it or the owner had previously had a small fire which he thought he had extinguished but had kept burning below the surface. His plot being mainly pine, has a thick layer of pine needles which are resinous and can smoulder below the surface and keep going for days. A good job it wasn’t summer and much drier or it could have been very severe.
Half the morning had gone by the time I got back to mine. Some of the neighbours arrived and it was good to just socialise for a while. One of them lit their own fire and I joked that we could have just gone around to the wild fire for a warm up. The main tasks for the day were to build my new fire and try lighting it using the birch bark scrapings technique much loved by bushcrafters. I wanted my fireplace to be raised off the ground so that the heat would be more aligned to my body when sitting and also involve less bending when lighting etc.
I placed some building blocks as legs and balanced a small concrete slab across it with two bricks as side walls which will also support a wire mesh for grilling. It was functional but looked too rigid and unnatural. I spent about an hour rearranging it, trying to hide the blocks, using the limestone rocks I dug up a few months ago. I’m not 100% happy with the look of it but for now it will suffice.
I went foraging for birch bark and found some nice pieces on some fallen trees. For fuel I collected small dead twigs that had fallen from above and lodged in the lower branches. These are best as they tend to be dry. I stored some in an old dustbin to keep dry for later fires. The technique of starting a flame is to lay the bark flat, shielding it from breezes. Then using a sharp knife, scrape the surface hard until you create a small pile of fine shavings. The bark contains a lot of volatile oils and will take a spark from a ferro rod (firesteel) and produce a small flame which can then be fed with dry tinder, thin bark peelings etc and by slowly adding twigs, build into a sustainable fire. Here’s my inaugural fire.
That was pretty much all the work I did but it’s good just to go and enjoy being there and playing like a ten year-old.
