Our one year ‘Living by Nature’ course is brought to you by two leading experts in Bushcraft and Primitive Skills –

• Thijmen Apswoude from Living by Nature
• Steven Le Say from Axe & Paddle Bushcraft

The course comprises of 40 days of complete immersion – spanning over a 12 month period.  Each day is packed full of expert tuition, inspiration, knowledge, craft and practical experience.  Everything you could wish to know about life in and with nature.

• One weekend per month (Friday until Sunday) focused on learning specific skills, such as fire, tinder, foraging, types of wood and trees, tanning hides, natural foods, tracking and way, way more
• Two full weeks perfecting the crafts of your choice that you’ve experienced during the year; working with beautiful materials such as bone, antler, tendons, flint and more
• Finally, at the end of the course, we’ll go on a two week long expedition together, living in a Neolithic setting in a foreign country, where we will celebrate all the skills, materials, relationships and experiences that you have gathered over the year and truly ‘live by nature’.

By the end of the year, every student will have handmade your own Neolithic equipment, including clothing, a travel basket, a blanket and tools, that you’ll use in the final expedition.   You will see and observe nature in all seasons and learn to work with different kinds of tools and materials – both modern and primitive.  Our instructors have an enormous amount of knowledge and experience to share with you and working with the same people every month – you’ll build a bond with like-minded people that will last a lifetime.

The course combines elements of bushcraft, survival, primitive and native skills and our own philosophy of living by nature.

This is not a ‘survival’ course and our goal is not to win the supposed ‘man against nature’ battle.  On the contrary, our philosophy is to be confident, self-secure and aware when in Nature. We teach you how to thrive in Nature for longer periods, utilising the many tools and materials She provides to you, to have a truly primitive (but in no way uncomfortable!) experience.

Our instructors have years of experience “Living By Nature” and after The Year Long Course, you too will have so much knowledge and experience that “Living By Nature” will become a part of you too.  By the end of the year, you will be capable of teaching others too.  What a skill to pass on!

Will you join us on our adventure?

• 11 three day weekends
• 2 full weeks of crafting
• A 2 week immersive expedition, abroad, with your ‘tribe’ and your handmade kit, where we will truly ‘Live By Nature’

Kick-off Day

We start with one informal ‘meet and greet’ day, for all the students and instructors to get to know each other.   On this day, we’ll check your equipment and discuss the coming year in terms of what you can expect to learn, routine and responsibilities (such as who bakes bread each day, tends the fire etc).  Straight off, the fun will start with activities such as cooking fish in clay and cooking in a ground oven.

Weekends 1 & 2 – The Basics of Living by Nature
The first two weekends we lay the foundations for the year, learning all the basic elements of living in nature.

• Tool Safety and Maintenance – working with knives and axes and saws etc and learning cutting techniques
• Fire and the Fire Place – making fire using a variety of traditional methods, learning the 7 stages of fire, understanding tinder and where to find it, working with different kinds of wood
• Tree and Plant Identification – hikes to learn and recognise different trees and plants within our surroundings and when and how to utilise the natural resources around you
• Shelter Building
• Nature and Game observation
• Skinning and Butchering a local deer or pig – prepping and drying the meat, harvesting the bones and sinew and turning the skin into rawhide, buckskin or fur
• Water purification
• Knots
• Natural First Aid

Weekends 3 & 4 – Advanced Skills

With the basic skills now taught, we will make a next step into more advanced subjects, teaching how to live comfortably, in a natural way.

• Hiking – all about the Bushcraft way to the forest
• Observing animals and their habitats
• Making a netting needle
• Axe Working
• Natural Fibre Cord Making including digging for spruce roots
• Transporting Fire
• Traps & Snares – the theory of trapping, trigger mechanisms, trap placement, bait and making a fish basket trap from willow
• Making a Leister Spear
• Making Bark Containers
• Working with Bone and Antler
• Working with Sinew
• Making Tar
• Making Natural Glue and pitch pine glue sticks
• Uses of resin, fatwood and birch bark – how to find and harvest them

Weekend 5 – Edible Nature and More

This weekend is a delicious foray of foraging, food preserving and primitive cooking.

• Identifying Edible Plants
• Drying Herbs
• Rendering Fat
• Smoking Fish
• Making Clay Pots
• Campfire Cooking
• Cooking in an Earth Oven
• Making Fat Lamps
• Making Soap

We continue with a weekend filled with everything about food and medicines and how to keep them, after the daily breakfast from the fire we will fill our weekend with activities such as: hikes focused on edible plants and how to recognize and dry them, harvesting fat, brining, individual free harvest time for edible plants for dinner, working with clay and baking pottery.

Weekend 6 – Pottery, Basketry and Wool Felting
Next up we will have a weekend where we focus on wool, travel baskets and pottery. We’ll teach you all about working with wool, how to  comb the wool, how to lay it how to felt it and how to make useful it out of it such as a blanket. We also teach you more about rawhide and it’s uses. We teach about bending wood with the use of steam and how to make a travel basket using steam bend wood and rawhide. The last day we will focus on working with clay, some more theory and then we are off making and baking pottery.

Weekend 7 – Flint Knapping

The art of flint knapping, in other words crafting with flint. We teach different techniques such as pressure and percussion flaking. We treat a variety of tools and stones, such as basalt, obsidian and flint.. we treat the theory that fits different periods in our history and after that we will make our own tools such as arrowheads, scraping tools, and knives!

Weekend 8 – Animal Behaviour & Tracking
The next weekend we will lay our focus on animals, we’re taking you to the red deer rut! That means waking up an early hour, going in to the forest and observing the animals. We’re going to make you more conscious of the animals and the world around you. We’ll be hiking again with a bushcraft perspective, to be more aware of the practical ways to utilize nature around you. We are also treating tracking this weekend, we will teach you to see the differences between different tracks from different species and how to read a trail so that you can gain knowledge about the animal your tracking.

Weekend – Working with Hides
We will be making buckskin and we’ll be tanning fish hides as well. You will learn the theory about hides and how to prepare then properly and off course we will put this in practice as well, everyone will make their own buckskin and tan their own fish hide.

Weekend 10 – Bow Making
As part of “being able to live in nature” you must be able to provide in your own meat and hides and everything else an animal has to offer. You will be making your own hunting bow and arrows. We’ll teach you about the different types of bows and what wood types are good to use, also we’ll learn you which arrows you use for which purpose.

Weekend 11 – Fishing, Fish Traps & Nets
Fish is also a resource you have to be able to catch before you can use it. We will teach you how to make your own fishing nets, fishing lines (out of natural materials)and you will work with bone and antler to make fishing hooks and spear tips. Also we treat fish traps in this weekend.

Weekend 12 – Surprise Weekend
this weekend we will provide you with even more information about making your own carrying system and clothing and we will add some nice surprise elements!

Crafting Week 1
This first week is focused on completing your kit which you will need for the two weeklong expedition. This can result in someone making flint arrowheads whilst someone else is getting their fishing kit complete. There is space for practice and repetition or an renewed instruction from our team.

Crafting Week 2
The second week is focused mainly on clothes, and not the brands of fancy outdoor clothing. You will be making your own clothes! Also you’ll be making your own water bottle from a calabash, packing systems from rawhide for the food stock for the expedition. These things take lots of time to complete so that’s why we have planned an entire week for this.

The Expedition

As a conclusion we will be going on our two week long expedition to a foreign country together to put everything we have learned an made in practice. We only bring the kit we handcrafted and we’ll be living like our ancestors. Walking around in our self-made clothes with our handmade travel baskets on our back whilst drinking water out of our handmade water bottles we will be providing ourselves with our primary needs out of nature’s resources with just the tools we’ve made ourselves such as our flint knapped knives. More about the expedition we will treat during the year.