For a while I chose to chase my fortunes and make my millions in the city, that never really worked out so I was brought back to Devon and the outdoors. In that time thanks to a couple of TV personalities "bushcraft" had become something of a trend and it was when I realised that groups that I was taking climbing were happier to do a bit of foraging, den building and fire making than to trug all the way to the crag to spend ten minutes scrambling to the top of a rock. It was another instructor who pointed out that what I was doing was known as bushcraft and that people were happy to do just that.
I never professed to being an expert however it seems that the abilities I had acquired were more developed and skilled than most, and that I could offer courses that gave people the level of understanding and inspiration to go out and comfortably spend time in the outdoors. As for taking time to stop and label what I was doing..... I guess it just never struck me as something that needed to be done. However the bushcraft vs survival question is one that keeps popping up and I thought deserved a little bit of thought and mention.
Ultimately I think I was never far wrong from the beginning. Referring to the Oxford English Dictionary; to survive something suggests that you are continuing to live or exist, sometimes after a dangerous event. Bushcraft is just a group of skills that one uses in the outdoors and yes some if not all of those skills are ones that would be useful in a survival situation. So really the more thought I put into it the less it seems to matter. it seems its not what is being done that's important, its why. I also suspect that the majority of people that are out there doing it aren't thinking too much about semantics and are probably, like me, just enjoying time in the outdoors
Personally I think it has more to do with zeitgeist and marketing than any actual ethos or skill set, Call it what you will. In fact its probably better not to give it much of a name at all. Especially if your already out there doing it. So next time I'm running a bushcraft course up here in North Devon, and I'm asked what it is I'm teaching I think I'll probably just give a smile and stick to my original answer.
Upcoming courses
| No events |
Testimonials
I was chatting to someone enquiring about an introduction to bushcraft course the other day,. When I was asked what the difference between bushcraft and survival was.
It is a question that pops up on most courses and one which I usually answer with a simple "Bushcraft means you chose to be there, survival is when you would rather be somewhere else."
But it got me to thinking about peoples perceptions of bushcraft and survival and what it is that actually separates them both.
I know when I first started spending time in the outdoors I didn't ever stop to think what the correct term for what I was doing is. Until I was given my very own copy of Lofty Wiseman's book, at which point it became survival. As I spent more time in the outdoors and came to become an outdoor pursuits instructor, my interests changed and I became a climber, a surfer a snowboarder and the skills that I had learnt just became the things that I did when I was in the outdoors.
