Deck the Halls

My poor children. Life must be very confusing for them.


They come home from their nativity rehearsals thinking they’ve got Christmas straight in their heads, and then I start banging on about Yule logs, festivals of light and the earth’s orbit.


Our modern culture of Christmas is a mix and match affair that brings together a number of belief systems. The Christian story of a new hope for humanity chimes perfectly with the ethos of the mid-winter festival that it replaced in early Christian Rome: Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, "the birthday of the unconquered sun.", was celebrated in Rome on 25 December, after the night of the winter solstice, to mark the beginning of the lengthening of the days. The candles, gift-giving and merriment had already been appropriated from the Saturnalia festival that originally concluded on 23 December.



Many aspects of Christmas come from Northern Europe, where late convertors to Christianity were encouraged to recast their cultural traditions in a new spiritual light. Yule is thought to derive from the Old Norse word for wheel, again marking the turn of the winter and the inevitable rebirth of the sun. The Finnish Joulupukki is a character who dresses in warm red clothing and goes from house to house bringing gifts for well-behaved children – sound familiar?


Christmas for me is a celebration of light in the darkest time of the year, a chance to express goodwill to others through the giving and receiving of gifts and a space to reflect and commune with my family. But my favourite bit of symbolism is our bringing of the outdoors indoors, with fruit-bearing holly and mistletoe and of course, a decorated and illuminated evergreen tree, to mark the miracle of life and and our place within it.



Winter festivals were always big news for agricultural societies, coming at a time when there was less work to do and long dark nights to fill with drinking and dancing. If there’s anything I regret about the evolution of Christmas, it’s the way we’ve replaced dancing with slobbing out in front of the TV.


Still, there’s always New Year’s Eve ...

Wild Child

I was in Wasdale in the Lake District when the Original Mountain Marathon was suspended amid severe weather. Paths became rivers, streams became impassable torrents and the athletes struggled to stay upright in the wind. At nightfall, an unknown number of runners were unaccounted for, sparking a level of media interest that stunned the race organisers, who had proceeded with the event against the advice of local mountain rescue teams.

I’d seen the weather forecast, which was quite good for the following days, and decided to drive up to the Lakes through the bad weather in order to be there already when the rain eased off and bag myself a few days’ walking. I managed to drive through almost the whole length of the flooded lane that flanks Wastwater, before abandoning my car and wading the last half a mile to the Wasdale Head Inn.

In the morning, one section that I had driven through looked like this:

It’s not every day that you get to drive through the deepest lake in England in an MX5.

Whatever you think of the race organisers’ decision-making, it is inevitable and healthy that people take risks in the outdoors. High on Yewbarrow and Red Pike the day after my arrival in Wasdale, the wind was still wild enough to offer a challenge and to blow in a few hailstorms quicker than I could get my raincoat on. Beauty, scale and the landscape’s timeless indifference to humanity will always be part of the thrill of the mountain wilderness, and its importance to our wellbeing.



A few days later I took a walk through a local wood in Buckinghamshire, surprising a muntjac deer, a hare and an owl. The autumn colours glowed into the dusk. That night, the clouds dumped an inch of snow on the Chiltern Hills, bringing down several beech trees whose leaves couldn’t shed the weight. I was reminded of Robert Macfarlane’s evolving sense of wilderness in his fabulous book, The Wild Places. From an initial view of wilderness as remote and extreme, he comes to see ‘the wildness of natural life ... the weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac’ and is forced to re-appraise the wild qualities of his own local landscape. I wondered why I’d burned carbon all the way to Cumbria when there is wilderness on my doorstep.



The importance of accessible, local, green space to communities in the UK can’t be overstated. The big national parks are important, but not more so than the woods down the road. This month’s Trail magazine quotes at length from Richard Louv, an inspiring US campaigner for a child’s right to experience the gifts of nature. Check out www.lastchildinthewoods.com . Louv coined the term nature deficit disorder to describe the net results of urban sprawl, reduced play range, increased safety fears and the growth of indoor, sedentary culture for children. In medical terms, it looks like ADHD, childhood depression and obesity. In social terms, it looks like dislocation, disaffection and rootlessness. The health of our children, our society and our environment are all linked.

Children learn to take risks in natural spaces. They learn to wonder. They value what they know. Without action to reverse the trend, my generation will have been the last in the UK to splash unsupervised in streams and climb trees en masse in the woods. Without immersive experiences in nature, environmental education is a joke. Louv and others have articulated the problem: the UK’s schools, parents and agencies must act. I think this will become the issue of our time.

I’m not prepared to be the last wild child in England.

Return to Teignhead

Flushed with the success of the Millie procession (see previous post), I picked up Bex and we bombed down the M4 towards Devon and the magic of Dartmoor. As far as the traffic jam, where we sat for the next hour and a half.

The plan was simple: a night of indoor luxury at Bristol’s Hotel Du Vin, followed by a night of outdoor luxury, wild camping at the remote ruins of Teignhead Farm, before heading home to be reunited with our children on Sunday night. It was going to be one of those weekends where everything takes longer than planned and everything happens a few hours behind schedule. We had a great time at the hotel, sitting down for dinner at 10.45pm, and not checking out until about midday. Great shower!

In welcome contrast to my previous trip to Teignhead (see Get off the moor, July posting), the weather was fine and settled as we struck out North from Postbridge. I tried not to fret about getting sunburned – call me paranoid, but I got well burned on Dartmoor at Easter in 2007. The following Easter I got snowed and hailed on in sub-zero temperatures. Dartmoor’s like that. One minute you’re adrift in fog, bog and snow; the next minute it’s all sunshine and ponies.



We made it to Grey Wethers stone circle in fairly good shape, and admired the open views over the moor. What happened to the communities that built all these circles so long ago? Dartmoor can’t have been any easier to live on then than it is now, so what started the exodus?

We came over the hill and down to the Teign River, having an unfounded stress about other campers nabbing our pitch, and set up next to the fire ring on the edge of the farmstead by Manga Brook. It’s such a beautiful spot.

With the sun dropping and the sky deepening, we sauntered back to the woods with a knife, a saw and an empty rucksack to gather some fuel. It was twilight by the time we returned to camp with enough kindling and logs for the night. I don’t know how legal this is, but for me it fits with the Forestry Commission’s mission statement of meeting the nation’s needs ...

After a moonlit night of food and wine by the fire, we crashed in the tent and awoke the next day later than expected. We struck camp and climbed up to Watern Tor, looping back around Sittaford Tor and back to the car. The time pressure of picking up children brought a little stress around the middle of the day (why I am still so rubbish at calculating route times?) and I ended up forfeiting the pint of Otter I’d planned for the Warren House Inn, but otherwise it was mostly sunshine and ponies.

I’m so used to going to the mountains on my own, it was great to have my wife with me on this trip, and to share a bit of Bex and Al time in the great outdoors.

Halcyon Days

On Friday 10 October 2008, a procession of over a hundred children and local residents made its way through the Haymill Valley nature reserve in Slough, in the culmination of Outdoor Culture's first public art project. The two children leading the parade wore cloaks of felt kingfisher feathers - every child had made one - as a gesture to welcome the Millie Kingfishers.

We were blessed with a perfect, bright autumn afternoon. The children were resplendent in kingfisher feather headresses, and the happy noise of drumming filled the woods as we strolled along the ancient mill stream. Along the way, we passed this installation of copper kingfisher amulets - every child had made one - spinning and glinting in the dappled sunlight.


Eventually we arrived at the weir at the far end of the Millie, where one day a bridge over the stream will complete a circular walk back through the other side of the wood. Here, the two leading children removed the cloaks they were wearing and we placed them over the wings of Pippa North's brilliant steel sculpture.

The Greek myth of Halcyon Days tells the story of two lovers, one drowned and the other so torn by grief that she took her own life. The gods pitied them and transformed them into kingfishers, granting them the Halcyon Days of peace and calm in which to raise their young.

Now the Millie has a new pair of kingfishers to watch over it. I hope that some of the children who celebrated with us will love this special place and look after it too. The project has given them a personal connection with the site and its wildlife: time will tell whether or not the seeds of stewardship take root and grow.

Pigeon stew and cramp balls

I've just returned from a bushcraft course that I set up with my friend Andy Noble of Nature's Craft http://www.naturescraft.co.uk that turned out to be one of those special weekends that only come along every now and then.

Andy's the expert, I just brokered the experience for an interesting mix of artists and environmentalists, and did my best to make sure that everyone had a good time. The latter turned out to be a pretty easy job - the group got on famously, and Andy and his brother Paul kept everyone happily busy with lots of entertaining bushcrafty challenges.

Over 2 nights and 2 days, we lit fire by friction (well, some of us did), made debris shelters, learned how to use our knifes (proudly worn by all), made string from nettles, carved spoons, butchered a pigeon each (nearly all of us, including one vegan) and slept out in the woods in our tents, under tarps or in the debris shelters we'd built. Probably my last sleep-out of the year without a tent.

I did my culture bit on Saturday night by playing a few songs round the campfire, before the baton passed to the multi-talented and very funny Duncan McAfee for some poetry and more music, until eventually we all ran out of tunes and alcohol. Paul Noble said it was the best night out on a camp he'd had in ages.

On Sunday, a few people found cramp balls growing on dead wood - also known as king alfred cakes, these black fungi are wicked for fire-lighting. Once dried, they catch easily and burn slowly, so they're good as coal extenders, transferring fire from tinder to kindling. They smell divine when they burn, but why are they called cramp balls? Puts you off eating them - like death caps, I wonder whether there's a clue in the name.

Preparing the pigeon was easier than I expected as a squeamish veggie. Less slimy than the trout I dealt with last time I was in these woods (see July's post), my bird was fluffy and heavier in the hands than I thought it would be. A small incision under the breast bone and the skin and feathers just peel away, leaving the breast eaily cut out with hardly a drop of blood. Rosy got well into it - she was looking for the girl-guide within but I think she found a full-on cavewoman instead.

For some reason I don't mind eating animals I've cut up myself, and I seem to have developed a meat habit when bushcrafting. My wife thinks I'm weird. Maybe it's like this bloke I know who only smokes in pub gardens. I tried a drag on a cigarette the other day, after not smoking for 7 years, out of curiosity. It was awful - really obviously poisonous. Bushcraft is much more addictive.

Climbing into a real bed on Sunday night felt a bit odd - other people on the course said the same thing. Houses really over-do the shelter thing most of the time. Back in the woods, I was cosy and warm and at home on the forest floor. Does this imply a fickleness in our sense of home, or a timelessness?

'Sunlight is necessary to it'

To what? Photosynthesis?

Actually, Henry Moore was talking about sculpture.

I'm doing quite a lot of work at the moment brokering partnerships between visual artists and agencies with green spaces where art might go. So I thought I'd post something on this blog about sculpture in the outdoors - my 'greatest hits' of the UK's open air galleries.

I would have started with Cowleaze Wood in Oxfordshire, previous home of the Chiltern Sculpture Trail, but sadly this has now closed. I've put in a proposal to re-imagine it as an outdoor arts space for the community, that Outdoor Culture would curate, so watch this space for news ...

The Eden Project in Cornwall, although not a specialist art site, has some accessible sculpture that reflects its mission to communicate the importance of plants. Best known for its iconic biomes (and therefore busiest on rainy days), Eden boasts some interesting artistic and horticultural attractions outside too. But my favourite is actually indoors, although lit by a giant skylight, and is set at the heart of Eden's education building, which was designed around it. This is 'Seed' by Peter Randall-Page.

'Seed' replicates the composition of seed heads within a flower. I enjoy work like this that responds to nature and relates to its setting. Randall-Page crops up in a few other sculpture sites, always exploring the mathematical beauty of the world. http://www.edenproject.com/

This piece by Neville Gable in the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail is called 'Raw', which reminds the viewer that they are standing in a working timber forest with an industrial heritage:

It's an entire oak tree felled, cubed and re-installed in the clearing created by its felling. For me it has real authority and presence - a man-made form that could not be made of more natural or local material. It is completely at home in its setting because the tree lived and died here. I love its simplicity. The Forest of Dean has several other interesting pieces, including a nicely weathered Randall-Page piece, connected by a 4.5 mile trail. It's worth a visit. http://www.forestofdean-sculpture.org.uk/

The grandaddy of site-specific art in natural settings is the Forestry Commission's Grizedale Forest in Cumbria. It's a massive site - I spent a whole day in the woods there earlier this year, and I still only saw about half the art it contains. It's a fantastic alternative to the Lake District's mountains in bad weather, with the fruits of over 30 years of artists making work in the woods, like this classic 1990 piece from Andy Goldsworthy, 'Taking a wall for a walk'.



Goldsworthy is a giant in terms of art in the environment, and justifiably popular. This piece continues to respond to its setting: when foresters harvested the pine around it, they exposed the trees within the wall's folds to higher winds, and a few have blown over, taking pieces of wall with them. Apparently Goldsworthy doesn't want it fixed, which is lucky because his labour's not as cheap as it used to be ...

My favourite piece in Grizedale is 'Habitat' by Richard Caink. It's so playful and fun, how could anyone resist sitting in the armchair and chilling out in front of the timber telly? The forest home of our ancestors now replete with modern conveniences:

I sat there for ages, still and alone. I'd like to see Caink do a series of these, maybe with a bedroom and a bathroom, a kitchen and a garage. Perhaps he'd do me an office? www.forestry.gov.uk/norwestenengland

The Cass Sculpture Park is a funny place. Loads of sculpture to look at, and nearly all of it for sale, but all too often the price tag is more amusing than the art itself, and the commodification is distracting. Interesting piece? Maybe. Worth £75,000? Not really. Because the setting is essentially a display cabinet, the work can't be expected to relate to its surroundings - the sculpture park is merely a stopover on the journey to a more permanent home. The presentation of some works is also fairly poor, with barriers intruding on the experience. I may not be a collector but I did pay to get in you know ...

Despite the niggles, there is lots of contemporary art in the Cass site that is worth seeing. Some works even succeed in feeling comfortable in their environment. This fabulous piece by Rob Ward is called 'Gate'.

With its endless reflections, it is indeed like a magic portal to a secret forest just beyond reality. Its own form is barely there, and it takes a lot of inspection to discover the simplicity of its construction. I wonder how many birds it kills? http://www.sculpture.org.uk/

Probably the best place in the UK to see a strong permanent collection of outdoor art alongside top notch temporary exhibitions is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park http://www.ysp.co.uk/ . They've got a Gormley, a few Goldsworthys and a plethora of Moores. I just love the Deer Shelter 'Sky Space' by James Turrell. A Victorian facade leads in to a kind of space-age temple, where a chamber lined with pale stone seating offers a stunning view of the sky through a crisp-edged opening in the ceiling. Turrell's success lies in creating the frame; for bringing the dynamic beauty of the sky close enough to touch. My photos of the sky space don't do it justice - but here's one from Dafydd Thomas:

Larger-scale 'land art' like this that helps people read the world differently has an appeal that stretches right back to Stonehenge. Stone circles probably deserve their own article at some point so I won't go into them here.

Henry Moore said that he would prefer to see his work presented in any landscape, rather than within a building. For me, it follows that the landscape is the obvious place to create your own sculptures. Here is an ephemeral piece that my 3 and 4 year old children made in Cornwall this year. They're available for commissions at very reasonable rates ...

Treasure from afar

I've come across a great blog - http://loveinatent.blogspot.com/ - by a writer in New Zealand called Maple Kiwi, or Michelle to her friends. She's written a book called 'Sex in a Tent' - now that's my kind of outdoor culture. Warmer and more private than sex under a tarp. Would that be wild dogging?


I miss New Zealand, I really do. What a cool country - big hills, loads of gorgeous beaches, a rich Maori culture, nice beer, plenty of dub and they drive on the left. My family and I are due back there in February 2010 for my 40th birthday, but I'd like to go in 2009 too. In fact, I'd like to go every year! The only problem is how to pay for the yeti-like carbon footprint of flying as far as you possibly can without actually going into orbit...



My 3 year old daughter said the other day that her favourite place in the world is Heather and Trevor's farm on South Island. It's alongside the Waimakariri river, down the road from Arthur's Pass and this limestone wonderland, Kura Tawhiti, meaning treasure from afar. This stunning location is a classic example of compromise between recreational, scientific and spiritual land users. The site has cultural significance to the ngai tahu people, and is also a designated conservation area for its rare plants. Despite the offence it causes to ngai tahu, the area is popular with rock climbers and boulderers. It's hard to avoid comparisons with Uluru in Australia, where Aboriginal wishes are ignored by hundreds of climbers on a daily basis and the cultural divide is shocking: 'It's just a rock' said the taxi driver. In the UK, we can't even touch Stonehenge, and I'm not sure which is the worse state of affairs.


My friends Matt and Janelle had a baby boy recently in their Auckland home. They married in 2004 at the aforementioned South Island farm. I wrote a song for the occasion called Festival of Love, which you can hear at www.reverbnation.com/wilburkyle . I can't wait to get back to Aotearoa and meet the boy.



Did I mention the gorgeous beaches? This is Maitai Bay, at the end of Northland's Karikari peninsula. It's perhaps my favourite beach in the world. We got up there in February this year, and were just thinking about Barry and Marlene, a Kiwi couple we'd last seen there on our previous visit in 2001. Naturally, they rocked up again in 2008 within minutes of our arrival. Now I know NZ has a small population, but come on!

Get off the moor!

I knew something was amiss when I noticed the pools of water inside my tent. I’d set off the previous afternoon for a 3 day walk over Dartmoor, and the last forecast I’d seen was for showers and sunny spells. I’d walked over Water Hill in the rain, enjoying the irony, got a bit lost in Fernworthy Forest, admired a rainbow and set up my tent at Teignhead Farm, an old abandoned homestead in a remote valley. I’d gathered some dead wood and impressed myself by getting a reasonable fire going despite the damp fuel and conditions. The evening was beautiful: moonlight, the warmth of a fire, a luxurious can of beer and even a shooting star to wish on.

I awoke to high winds and heavy rain lashing the tent around dawn. Fine. I hid in the tent, waiting for the weather to break. For ages. It kept raining. Then I noticed the tent starting to flood. Bugger. I got dressed and left the tent to have a look around. The stream that I’d camped next to was dividing and multiplying: a new course was flowing past right next to my tent. The hollow in which I’d made a fire was now 2 feet deep in water. The spare logs I’d stood up to keep them clear of the damp ground were now bobbing about like little boats. The stream was beginning to flow over the stone bridge by which I’d crossed it. Water was everywhere. I had the strong sense of a river rising from the ground beneath me. I’d planned a wild swim in the Dart below Mel Tor for later that evening, but the water feature had arrived earlier and less romantically.

I assessed my situation. Conditions overhead: rubbish. Conditions underfoot: rubbish. Sleeping bag: sodden. I’d brought my much-loved soft shell jacket but left my proper raincoat at home to save weight. No sign of a sunny interval anywhere. I was way beyond my comfort zone into the adventure zone, and I could almost see the border with misadventure. There was only one sensible option: get off the moor! I packed up and retreated.

Taking the easy forest road back past the sublime Fernworthy stone circle, I met a kindly forester who gave me a lift back to my car. When I told him where I’d camped, his response was ‘Oh shit!’

Dartmoor 1, Al 0.

I got the photo for this blog from http://www.dartmoorperspectives.co.uk/

Bushcrafty in Wiltshire

It is said that the recent history of outdoor pursuits has been to replace missing knowledge with equipment. Bushcrafters strive for the opposite, by seeking to replace missing kit with knowledge. Check me out trying to light fire by rubbing sticks together!

I had a great weekend in June with some bushcrafty friends, playing in a private wood in Wiltshire. I'm used to wild camping on my mountain trips, but this showed me a new way of spending time outdoors, and a very different camping style. My friends were irrepressibly evangelical - they weren't happy until I was wearing my knife round my neck and abandoning the enclosure of my tent for a night out sleeping on the forest floor under a 'basha' - a tarp stretched out between two trees.

Despite the heavy rain I was warm and dry under my borrowed basha. At dawn I woke first to birdsong, and then later to the sound of an axe splitting wood to refuel the fire. The beauty of a basha is that you can see out from beneath it - you are connected to your environment, rather than removed from it. Stumbling over my guy rope and losing the peg, I smugly unsheathed my knife and fashioned a new one from green hazel.

Bushcraft is the perhaps the oldest form of culture, and is tied up with the development of language, music and society, in that the discovery of fire-lighting created conditions in which early humans could could gather and commune. It is the culture of survival and expression - like hip hop, it is about finding comfort in your environment.

I found little comfort in gutting and filletting the trout we caught for dinner. As a fairly strict vegetarian since 1992, I get even less contact with raw meat than the average carnivore, for whom preparation can be no more visceral than removing the plastic. This was sticky, gory and grim, but wonderfully real. Uncomfortable, yes, but affirming and honest. Seared to perfection on the fire, it tasted of reality, wildness, and of course, fish. Wild camping indeed.