2011 Dates...

Our dates for next year are now live on the website...

Willow’s oak basket workshop

Woodsmoke instructor Willow Lohr is hosting an Oak Swill Basket workshop with Owen Jones, at her farm up in Scotland. Owen is one of a small handful of split oak basket makers left in the British Isles and was featured on Last year's BBC's Victorian Farm series illustrating how to make an Oak Swill Basket. Places are limited, so use the email address in the image below for more details on how to contact Willow.


NEW DATE! - Due to demand, we are offering a second Autumn Harvester course this year from the 1 - 3 of October. With the mushrooms already starting to appear, it's going to be a great weekend...get involved!

New Course - Re-connect with your origins and spend a couple of days with us on the Flint Knapper with stone-age skills experts Will Lord and Werner Pfeifer, playing with sticks and stones to learn the fundamental techniques of lithic technology. Werner’s Kalahari Bushmen friends will also be there. The course is only £195 and will begin on the morning of the 12th of July.

Check out Ben Orford's new website - for bushcraft knives, bushcraft tools and leather work. Ben is the maker of the 'Woodlander' knife available with the Woodsmoke logo stamped in the blade.

Welcoming Marcus to the team

Throughout 2009 many of you will have encountered Woodsmoke's
latest assistant instructor and backwoods chef extraordinaire,
Marcus Storey. We've finally gotten round to uploading Marcus'
Bio on the website, where you can read about how he has honed his expedition cookery skills everywhere form the African bush to the London Stock exchange!

New Course for 2010!!! The Woodcraft & Whittling Workshop.

The main thrust of this course is to teach advanced carving techniques. We will focus mainly on knife skills covering classical Scandinavian carving projects such as kuksas, decorative techniques and Kolrosing. There will also be a strong emphasis on our own traditional British heritage of greenwood carving. A perfect companion course to the Axe Workshop, this weekend workshop will suit those of you who really enjoyed the carving aspects of the Woodlander or would like to refine the
skills learnt on the axe course.

New Book Reviews

Ben has recently been asked to write a couple of book reviews, you can read them on the 'Reviews' page of our website.

The first review is of a no nonsense book called 'The Modern Hunter-Gather' by Tony Nester, the founder of Ancient Pathways, based in Arizona.

The second review is of Frank Coles' 'How to Drive a Tank: and Other Everyday Tips for the Modern Gentleman' that features an in-depth review of our Woodlander course.

Our latest new-look newsletter can be read here - News from the Woodsmoke Campfire


We have appeared in 'The Time' again as one of the 'Top things to do in Cumbria this Summer'!


We have redesigned our resources section which now has a new 'Skills Tutorials' section which contain illustrations from Ray Mears book 'Bushcraft', illustrated by Woodsmoke's co-founder Ben McNutt - some of these step-by-step illustration did not appear in 'Bushcraft' and are being showcased here for the first time...

The 'Resources Pages' are under construction but will soon contain -

• Flash galleries giving step-by-step bushcraft skills tutorials
• Online video lessons (coming soon...)
• The bushcraft and tracking quiz to test your knowledge
• Product, book and courses reviews
• Bushcraft equipment advice for every environment
• The A-Z of bushcraft books - our recommended reading list
• Web links - Woodsmoke's favourite bookmarks

The 'Media Pages' have also been given a facelift and now contain links to Woodsmoke in the newspapers, in magazines and to our new Bushcraft Social Network Group.

We are pleased to announce that Fergus Drennan (also known as Fergus the Forager, from BBC’s Road-kill Chef) will be joining us next year on our seasonal wild foods and wilderness cookery courses. Fergus’s wealth of knowledge about wild edibles and his wacky recipe ideas are guaranteed to add some extra flavour to the wild food courses! You can find out more about Fergus by visiting his website - www.wildmanwildfood.com