Woodland Ways: survival, bushcraft and country craft skills

By Mark Hajdukiewicz on 16th December, 2013, filed in Company profiles, Features

Learning to live with the materials that nature provides and taking food from your surrounding environment is something that all animals do to a greater or lesser extent.

In the case of humans we took this natural instinct and increasingly refined it. Shelters became more extravagant and mealtimes evolved from merely eating for survival into events and experiences of enormous importance.

Nowadays we have gone way beyond that and a quick trip to the shopping centre or a few clicks online and we can have practically anything we want in double quick time. Due to evolution our survival instinct is now largely redundant but that doesn’t mean that the primal urge to get back to nature isn’t still buried somewhere inside us.

Recently those ancient skill have been brought back into the public conscious by bushcraft experts, such as Ray Mears and Chief Scout Bear Grylls, who’s knowledge and enthusiasm has afforded them an unlikely celebrity status in this everything on-demand world.

Thankfully, if that urge does surface, there are ways to scratch that itch that go beyond the basic; pitch tent, warm up beans on a burner camping trip. Woodland Ways is the UK’s largest provider of bushcraft, survival and country craft courses and boasts award winning instructors and a huge Bushcraft Store in Bedfordshire. The team also work with the mainstream media as well as many local projects to help spread the bushcraft and survival ethos to anyone who is has been bitten by the bug.

Everything you could imagine is catered for and with centres in Oxfordshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Bedfordshire augmented by other venues both here and abroad there is a mind boggling choice of experiences available. Fancy a 10 day wild bushcraft safari in South Africa, or a 12 day expedition to the Sahara – they do that. Want to learn to make traditional turkey feather arrows or carve a spoon? There are workshops for that too. Whether you are an individual or are running a youth group, corporate team or stag/hen night Woodland Ways will arrange a never to be forgotten experience completely tailored to your needs.

The team’s wealth of experience means that they are always in demand for projects with the media where they provide research, safety advice, survival and craft instruction, venues, presentation and infrastructure services. The BBC, Discovery Channel, Countryfile, Daily Mail, Bushcraft and Survival Skills Magazine and Talk Business have all benefitted from their expert knowledge.

A short stroll with Kevan Palmer, a senior instructor at Woodland Ways, unearths dozens of edible plants many of which had unexpected tastes, aromas or medicinal uses. The depth of knowledge is encyclopaedic and at Woodland Ways their passion is to share it with you.

Check out the full programme or courses, workshops and services as well as the online store on their website here.