Survival skills and primitive ways

Activity 22      Make a Willow Whistle

This activity shows you how to create music by making a simple whistle using willow stems. All you need is some coppice willow rods that are straight and free of knots. Try this with different coloured stems in March-May when the bark is easy to peel.

Activity 37      The use of wattle and daub in timber frame construction

Once virtually all houses involved willows somewhere in their construction most often as part of the woven material in the wattle and daub technique. It involves the weaving of rods around uprights to produce wattling which is made weather proof by smearing over it a covering of daub, a mixture of clay earth and plaster mixed with straw. Today, the technique has had a minor resurgence with the increase in timber frame dwellings. 

Activity 40       Make a tally stick – a willow “credit card”

For 700 years between the 12th -19th centuries the British monetary system was dominated by the use of tally sticks made of split hazel, willow or box wood. From the reign of Henry I these sticks provided receipts and contracts in all transactions with the Royal exchequer and enabled individuals to lend money to and borrow from the Government.  This activity explains how to make your own.

Activity 46      Take to the water in a coracle

Coracles are small flat bottomed one man boats with no keel or rudder. They have certainly been used in Britain since Roman times. The coracle used on the river Teifi in Wales is made from willow. Each year there are several coracle regattas in Wales and Shropshire where you can see the different types being made and watch coracles races.

Activity 58      Make a fire without matches

Willow is one of the best woods for making fires but one of the poorest fire woods. The low density of the wood means that there is more space between individual fibres and when two sticks are rubbed together there is greater opportunity for these to be agitated by friction and produce an ember. This activity explains how to create a fire using the bow drill technique.

Activity 69      Make a pair of snow shoes

Willows are a very important resource when one aims to survive in the wilderness. If you are caught in Polar or mountain regions withies can be used to improvise snow shoes. Here’s a very simple method that might prove to be a real life saver.

Activity 71      Using willow bark to make cordage

Strange as it may seem, willows can be used to make rope! This is done using the inner bark of slender saplings such as you would find in a willow coppice. This activity demonstrates a simple way of producing small lengths of cord from willow.

Activity 77      Make a Hoko knife

Before humans learnt how to smelt and cast metals into useful instruments they had to rely on tools made from stone and wood. An example of a stone-age tool is the Hoko knife which consists of a very small, sharp stone flake secured in a split wood handle tied together with rough cordage. This activity shows you how to do it.

Activity 83      Go camping in a yurt

A yurt is a circular, timber framed building traditionally covered in felt which is the ultimate low impact, portable home. Yurts have been used by nomadic peoples in Central Asia, Mongolia and Siberia for over 4,000 years and their design has hardly changed in all that time. Several websites run yurt holidays enabling you to test out the lifestyle before you commit to buying one or making one yourself.

Activity 99      Go fly fishing

When Izaak Walton wrote The Compleat Angler in 1653, fishing rods were made of willow, hazel or aspen. A rod could be up to 4.5 metres in length and made of two or more parts joined together. To make a fishing rod this way would be a challenge to even a highly skilled wood worker. Therefore instead this activity describes a much simpler version that you might wish to quickly fashion during a hiking trip.