Bushcraft is booming again

Increasing numbers of people around the world are taking to woodlands and wildernesses to learn ancient survival skills and rekindle a lost connection with the natural world.

“So – what do you think’s going to kill you first?” said Original Outdoors instructor Richard Prideaux, with the hint of a smile. “Starvation’s a few weeks down the track. Water’s not a problem – there’s a river down there. But hypothermia, yes. That’s a possibility on a night like tonight.” He looked up at the brittle winter sky, clouded only by wisps of breath. “Yep,” he said. “We’re gonna freeze.”

It was mid-January, and I was standing in a woodland near the Welsh market town of Ruthin with a grubby backpack at my feet. I would be joining the increasing numbers of people in Britain and worldwide taking to woodlands and wildernesses to learn ancient survival skills – foraging food, making fire, building a shelter – to rekindle a lost connection with the natural world. Tonight was set to be the coldest night of the year; beyond the ash and birch trees, the humps of the Clywdian Hills were dusted with snow. My first survival experience would be a baptism of ice.

Human beings are extinct in the wild. The majority of us would be clueless in a true survival situation, having been coddled and cosseted by the comforts of civilisation. Cloistered away in our homes and offices, with fresh water at the turn of a tap, warmth at the touch of a button and food delivered to our doors, we have lost touch with the natural rhythms and resources that keep us alive. The acquisition and practice of survival skills seeks to redress this imbalance, and it has a name: bushcraft.

“With camping, you’re just existing in an outdoor environment,” Prideaux said, as we set off into the woods in search of edible mushrooms. “Bushcraft is about interacting with it in a meaningful way; knowing where your break points are with the environment.” Take mushrooms, for example. There are more than 100 edible species in the UK, but many are easily confused with near-identical ones, several of which are easily poisonous enough to end a human life. Was that a delicious chanterelle I could see sprouting amid the heather, or its doppelgänger the deadly webcap? The oak trees in these woods shelter the innocuous-looking death cap, whose pale fruiting body contains enough poison to kill two men.

For these reasons, we settled on the unmistakable wood-ear: a gelatinous, harmless and largely tasteless mushroom with the flavour and consistency, in Prideaux’s words, “of unflavoured Haribo”. The rest of my day was spent lashing logs together to form a shelter, gathering water from a raging river, and, most taxingly of all, building a fire using wood wet from the Welsh winter.

As Prideaux showed me how to use resinous birch bark as tinder and pine branches for kindling, I asked him about bushcraft’s purported mental health benefits. “I’m dubious about the outdoors being a cure-all for mental health problems,” he said, “but the benefits are obvious. I see it in myself, I see it in other people. Being outdoors, away from screens, changes all the inputs into your brain. It doesn’t make your problems go away, but it allows you to see them from a different angle.”

BBC