Wilderness Gathering 2010

After a very tiring and damp few days at the Wilderness Gathering in Wiltshire, everything is now unpacked and cleaned.

As usual it was a fantastic 4 days meeting old and new friends. For Woodlife Network, it was highly successful as we reached our projected target on keyring sales/donations. Thanks to everyone who contributed. This will help keep the network going throughout the year.

Jon Mac, Angelo and Chris Grant all sent down their wares and both got a lot of interest. Chris’ knives weren’t for sale unfortunately but we sold some of Jon’s stuff; one kuksa will be on it way to South Africa soon.

The extreme baking competition also went well and we raised £40 for the Survival International charity. As always it was amazing to see the ingenuity of some people and how they made their bread and cakes from a simple mix.

We ran an impromptu spoon carving session and we had about 30 people at the back of our stall under the tuition of George and Nick (two of our members who helped out).

Again I’m indebted to them for their help. Everyone there completed a spoon project and there was some cracking examples of first-time spoons.

Not everyone was impressed with the proceedings!

For me personally it was hard work. I had two “Bushcraft and the Law” lectures to do as well as running the stall.  I also helped out Shadowhawk Tracking School. The night tracking was scheduled at 7.30pm which was not ideal to say the least. When we went to collect those interested, we thought that the queue outside the beer tent was a little large. As it was, it was the queue for the night track! We estimated it was over 100 people!!

Luckily Simon, one of the other Shadowhawk instructors came over to help and of course I was indebted to Steve who was also there to help. In fact without Steve, who was at my side all weekend, I don’t think I would have coped with everything going on. Cheers buddy. As usual a great team! Despite the numbers it was a great success and we had some great feedback.

One of the many high points of the weekend was me getting my Shadowhawk instructor feather from Max Maxwell.

As I said, it was great to see friends and meet new ones. If I didn’t have a lot of time to talk to everyone I do apologise. I’m now going to lay down for two days to recover!

Thanks for the visit.