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Bushcraft Essentials

Everything a beginner bushcraft course covers, for you to learn and practise yourself: staying safe, knife and folding saw, shelter and knots, fire without matches, water, cordage and simple campfire cooking. No axes or bow drills.

68 Wilding activity guidesAll 68 for £12.00 · coming soon

Bought from re-wild before? Log in and you only pay for the Wilding activity guides you don’t already own.

🃏 Includes a printable card set: every Wilding activity guide as an A6 card (four to an A4 sheet) to spread out, plan with or use for a lucky dip. See a sample

See the whole collection at once. Plan a programme, pick tonight’s activity, or let the lucky dip choose for you. Tap any card to open its Wilding activity guide.

Preparing an emergency action plan

Visual tree assessment

Estimating wind speed & the risk

Predicting rain

Handling plants & trees that scratch & sting

Meeting poisonous plants & trees

Finding edible & poisonous lookalikes

Hand washing in the wild

When nature calls!

Selecting the right tool for the job

Getting to know a sheath knife

Holding a knife

Passing a knife to another person

Sharpening & caring for a sheath knife

Thumb push & pivot techniques

Chest lever technique with a knife

Thumb pull technique

Reinforced pull technique

Wrist push technique

Using a knife in a forehand /fist grip to chamfer or point

Batoning with a sheath knife

Splitting wood along it’s grain with a knife in reversed grip

Carving a notch with a sheath knife

“Peeling a stick”

Making a small tent peg

Making a large peg

Handling a folding handsaw

Cross cutting with a folding handsaw

The right shelter for the job

Positioning a shelter

Building a debris shelter

Mini debris shelter

Putting up a shelter pole

Erecting a lean-to tarp shelter

Erecting an ‘A’ frame tarp shelter

The right knot for the job

Tying a bowline

Tying a clove hitch

Tying a round turn & two half hitches

Tying a sheet bend

Tying a taut tarp hitch

Tying an adjustable guy line hitch

Using a Prussik hitch in a tarp shelter design

Positioning a fire

The right fire for the job

Finding natural tinder

Making a tinder bundle

Locating & gathering dry kindling & wood fuel

Making a feather stick fire lighter

Using a ferrocerium rod & steel

Using a flint & steel striker

Making charcloth tinder

Transforming an ember into a flame

Lighting a fire

Laying & using a criss-cross fire

Laying & using a V fire

Closing down a fire

Finding wild water in natural spaces

Making wild water safe to drink

Extracting the outer fibres from a common nettle

Plaiting fibres to make cordage

Making & cooking with a skewer

Making fire bread

Making & using a pot hook

Safety, and where the Wilding activity guides come from

Look after yourself and others. Outdoor activities carry real risks: fire, tools, water, weather, heights, plants, fungi, animals and getting lost. Every Wilding activity guide includes safety notes, but you are responsible for your own safety and for anyone in your care. Supervise children closely, get the landowner's permission, follow the Countryside Code, never eat anything you cannot identify with complete certainty, and only light fires where it is allowed and safe. If in doubt, leave it out.

With gratitude to the lineage. Wilding and its Practice Keys are inspired by the work of Jon Young and colleagues: the core routines of nature connection in the 8 Shields approach, also known as Coyote Mentoring, shared in Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature (Young, Haas & McGown). Many of the Wilding activity guides grew from those routines.

These ways of noticing and belonging are far older than any book. They grow from the knowledge of Indigenous and land-based peoples around the world, who have lived in close relationship with the land for thousands of years and have kept that knowledge alive, often in the face of great loss. Jon Young describes 8 Shields as built on patterns of nature connection he found in Indigenous cultures around the world, and on what his mentors taught him, including the teachings passed down through Tom Brown Jr. from Grandfather Stalking Wolf. Our own ancestors in these islands once knew the land in this way too.

I offer Wilding with deep respect and thanks to all of them. It does not claim or copy any culture's ceremonies or sacred practices. It is a UK way of carrying forward simple, shared human ways of paying attention, giving thanks and belonging to a place. — Jay