The first night, passed in a mouldering lean-to built by a previous participant, is rough. Although the challenge of missed or meagre meals seems obviously physical, the major battle, as with real survival situations, is fought in your head.

Leon explains: “Mental strength is the number one thing. People have been in desperate straits with very little chance of survival but had the determination to pull through.”

After a morning mug of boiled leaves we turn to meatier matters, that is rabbit snaring, which is legal when you have permission from the land owner. Leon teaches us how to spot the areas of flattened grass that mark their runs and why it’s a good idea to avoid using deodorant: a spray of Lynx may attract legions of near-naked women but it will also deter your dinner.

Confident the traps are well placed we set off foraging. I’m cheered by the thought that plants can’t run. Without knowledge it’s easy to take the countryside for granted but Leon can read the landscape like a book and he reveals the wonders hidden in plain sight.

Back at the camp we have time to build our own shelters, one of the four basic necessities of survival, alongside water, fire and food. I gather logs for an A-frame and chop armfuls of bracken for waterproofing. It takes me three hours. It’s only once I finish grafting, on an almost empty stomach, that I realise how tired I am.

There are three, increasingly severe, stages of starvation: first the body uses up glucose reserves, then it digests fat (lipolysis) and, finally, muscle (catabolysis). Thankfully we’ll make only a brief foray into the second stage. With no caffeine, sugar or alcohol for four days might I actually emerge feeling good?

While toiling under the sun gouging burdock roots from hard packed earth it seems unlikely. On the final morning I leap at the chance to try ‘hobo fishing’. I lie in wait among brambles and tree roots, straining my ears to catch activity in the shallow stream. No dice. In despair I dig up and eat a couple of wild garlic bulbs. As my mouth burns I curse my foolishness but still manage a laugh when fellow survivalist, Dave, reveals his own comfort eating – a live worm.

That afternoon I’m on the train home, tearing chunks from the steak slice clutched in my filthy hands while manicured commuters look on in disgust. I feel happy to have peeked into the enriching world of bushcraft and experienced, albeit briefly, the rewards of privation.

Now the holidays are here again and a frenzy of consumption is inevitable. Although the spoils of the virtual basket are unlikely to include anything I really need. My new year’s resolution, then? Log off, get back to the woods and challenge myself to discover more of nature’s vast potential.

Bushcraft Butchery

Even if you manage the tricky business of trapping an animal, that’s only half the battle. Here Daniel Wildey explains how to prepare a pigeon for the pot, and why butchering your own food is a different experience altogether.

I’m walking back from the dugout latrine a couple of hundred metres from our basecamp in the depths of the Cumbrian woodland, when I notice a kind of macabre washing line near the makeshift kitchen. ‘Drip-drying’ are the intact carcasses of thirteen pigeons.

The line wasn’t there yesterday, and our bushcraft instructors from Cumbrian-based outfit Woodsmoke, haven’t mentioned what’s on tonight’s menu… I put two and thirteen together and come up with backcountry butchery.

I’ve never hunted, never killed my own food, and never prepared something that looked so much like, well, an animal. But I’ve never been averse to these things.

Pigeons have a crop – part of the oesophagus where food is stored to be digested later – and my first task is to clear the crop of any snacks the pigeon might have been toting around. By massaging the upper part of its chest I’m supposed to push any morsels back up into the poor guy’s throat.

While the bird sizzles with some mushroom, onion and stock-of-the-woods (aka packet soup) I carry out the altogether less exhilarating task of making pastry. But how do you bake a pie on a campfire?

With nesting billy cans. I line the smaller can with pastry, ready to pop into the larger can, and put a few stones in the bottom of the larger one to create a space the whole way around my cooking pot.

The pie still burns, but only slightly. And the primal experience of its creation adds a flavour that no chef could replicate.

To read the rest of the December ‘Excess’ Issue head here 

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