The Wildman School of Bushcraft

About The Wildman

About Hedgehunter

Our Aims and Goals


Mission statement

In the past the centre of all communities whether with friends, family or work colleagues was the fireplace.  In a tradition that goes back to the beginning of mankind’s relationship with fire, it was a communal place to meet and chat, a place to gather for warmth and protection but mainly for the old to share their knowledge with the young.  In today’s society it seems that this community focus has been lost in favour of the media, wealth, status symbols and central heating. 

Both of us were lucky, we still experienced, with a feeling of safety, that youthful abandon that took us through fields exploring, into wild areas to make bases & camps and into rivers, making boats from pieces of rubbish we found, (something a modern day parent might find hard to allow). Our parents gave us as much knowledge about our surroundings as they could and encouraged us to join groups like the Scouts, Cadets and the Duke of Edinburgh award scheme and later gave us the curiosity to travel and live in other parts of the world, but in a society where both parents are having to work increasingly long hours, they just don’t have the time to pass on the old knowledge that teaches us so many of the skills that help us in untold ways throughout our lives.

We still wanted more!

So, we had to go out and discover more of these old skills for ourselves; we found people that still had this knowledge - friends, relatives, teachers and our friends’ parents. We watched people on television like Les Hiddins (The Bushtucker Man), Ray Mears and Bear Grylls and we are still learning from the internet and from new people we meet. We believe that these skills have enabled us to grow into better equipped adults; to have an understanding of nature and the world that we live in and to have confidence in who we are and where we come from.

In participating and then later working with various youth projects we have noticed a direct link between having the opportunity to learn these key skills in a safe controlled environment and being able to succeed in a tough, challenging world.  When presented with something new, most youths will rise to a challenge and provide observations and solutions which most adults have lost.  This willingness to experiment with, and to explore, new ideas is what promotes a healthy mind and we believe that providing new adventures to our youth will encourage them to seek their own adventures and continue the tradition of children having fun, something that is being lost in favour of adult ideas of material possessions and status. Although these things can be important to us as well, so too are the ability and aptitude to create adventures and stories that will last a lifetime.

In our work with families we have found that something as simple as a parent and child spending time at a group or event learning  new skills together can have an amazing effect on the family bond.  We believe that if these skills are some of humanity’s oldest skills then this knowledge, of how to exist with the nature that surrounds us and how it has kept mankind fed, watered and sheltered for centuries, then this bond encouraged will be even greater.  

We believe that the land we inherit has been given to us in trust and needs to be maintained to ensure that the next generation can benefit from the same muddy kneed experiences we had.