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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 almost 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.
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"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."
With camping, you're just existing in an outdoor environment; bushcraft
is about interacting with it in a meaningful way
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."
Friendly and knowledgeable, yet stern about the dangers that nature can
pose, Prideaux is an old-school survival expert in the mould of Ray
Mears, whose 1990s television shows exposed a generation of Brits to the
quiet joys of the outdoors. Social media, however, has ushered in a new
wave of celebrity bushcrafters less restrained in their approach.
One example is Paul Hayes, christened "Ray Beers" for his humorous
outdoor videos featuring wild camping, spear fishing, beer reviews and
heartfelt monologues about the healing power of nature. Hayes, who
broadcasts to more than 100,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel Haze
Outdoors, agrees that bushcraft can be a tonic for the mind. "I've
always struggled a little bit with my mental health – I've got ADHD and
my brain's my enemy sometimes," he said. "Being outdoors calms me, it
centres me. It's a medicine."
"The first time I ever created fire from scratch, I made a bow drill
from my shoelace and a knife. It took me ages, but it's one of the top
five things I've ever done in my life. It's ingrained in human beings –
knowing that if you get fire, you've got warmth, you can cook food.
There's a primal feeling of conquering something beyond technology."
Despite his success on social media, Hayes recognises its potentially
damaging effects.
"Before social media, you could go up into the Lake District and be the
only wild camper there," he said. "Now you go up Angle Tarn on a
Saturday and it's like Glastonbury Festival. People can monetise nature
nowadays. There are profiles on Instagram whose whole shtick is giving
away secret beauty spots in the UK. Not very secret anymore, then, is
it?"
Social media's ability to introduce bushcraft to a wider audience has
its benefits, however. Helen Payne runs Discover Bushcraft, an outdoor
skills organisation in Essex that offers a course aimed specifically at
helping women learn bushcraft skills.
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"I started Women in the Woods after the first lockdown; 80% of my
Facebook followers are women," Payne said. "All these mums were
home-schooling and working from home, and they needed something for
themselves. There is an emotional need to be connected to nature, and
that mixture of learning new skills and being outdoors is fantastic for
people's mental health. Conversation is different around a campfire than
around a coffee table. You can talk about everything under the sun."
Even with help close at hand, I felt immediately more at ease once my
fire was finally up and roaring – an evolutionary memory, perhaps, of a
time when it really could have been the difference between life and
death.
"Just being around a fire has a calming effect," said Dr Lisa Fenton, a
bushcrafter, ethnobotanist and environmental anthropologist at the
University of Cumbria. "You're safe from predators, safe from
hypothermia, you can cook food. Fire transforms your experience of being
outside, which has a deep evolutionary imprint."
Safe and warm beside my fire, my body well-used from my day's work, I
slept soundly that night – despite sub-zero temperatures, lightly
falling snow and the snuffling of a fox or badger that stirred me as it
passed near my camp.
"Bushcraft develops inner qualities like patience, perseverance,
humility, observation and resilience," Fenton said. "People feel
empowered, more self-reliant, and less reliant on others. Indigenous
communities tend to foster those qualities in younger people; that's
often missing from our education system. We don't need to start a fire
by rubbing sticks together anymore, or to know which plants contain
medicines. But these are our basic human skills that have kept us alive
for millennia – it's only in the last few centuries that's really
changed."
Bushcraft develops inner qualities like patience, perseverance,
humility, observation and resilience
There is a gnomic saying often uttered in bushcraft circles, usually
when a dark, cold night is closing in around a campfire: "Civilisation
is a clearing in the forest". The idea that civilisation could once
again become overgrown, leaving us to grapple again with nature in the
dance of our ancestors, may appeal only to the most ardently apocalyptic
survivalist. For all of us, though, a greater connection to nature and
our role within it is critical to our understanding of the little
clearing in the forest in which we make our lives.
"Nature's not trying to sell you anything, it hasn't got any agendas –
it's just honest and true," Hayes had told me. "Nature is the only thing
that isn't going to lie to you."
Just so long, that is, as you're absolutely certain about that mushroom.
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