I’d completely forgotten to post this – Bushcraft Magazine‘s Summer Issue features a couple of pieces by me. There’s a how-to-make a Valaska, a Carpathian shepherd’s walking axe, and another true forest horror story. Order a copy or, better yet, subscribe for a year’s worth. It’s the best magazine on the subject out there.

It always takes me a while to re-adjust to living in the “back of beyond” (as my friend Dominic calls it) after returning from the UK. The best way, I find, is to spend as much time at the house as possible and go out every day into the forest, or for long country walks, […]

After a bout of moaning, winging and complaining that I always cut her head off in photos when she models clothes for me, I decided to give my long-enduring wife her own blog post. This is a beautiful meadow we chanced upon by accident in the hills outside the village after unsuccessfully hunting for mushroom […]

The Drustvo (village cooperative farm) finally got around to cutting the chin-high grass in the meadow behind my house. Trying to navigate through that jungle, either in tracks and furrows I’d created or which large herbivores had made, was a nightmare. I never knew what I’d disturb laying up in it – thankfully just roe […]

Knowing that we’d be away for a week or two, I set the gamecam up in my favourite spot – one which gets no human visitation due to its inaccessibility. Once we’re back at the house for a longer period I’ll move it to higher ground and try and get some big predators. There was […]

After a stressful and very busy week with all the kids away at various times in different countries visiting capital cities on school trips, and a lengthy drive into Poland to get some diagnostics done on my Vlochka, my Discovery, we only managed to squeeze one night in at the house. Thankfully, the weather was […]

On the news here there was an interesting piece about a large cat, Beast of Bodmin style, which had been filmed in Eastern Slovakia, just 15 miles from where I live, close to the town of Bardejov. The attached photograph is a still from the video shown on the news site – http://www.noviny.sk/c/slovensko/nezname-zviera-sa-objavilo-nedaleko-bardejova-podla-odbornikov-ide-o-selmu. Experts have […]

My favourite day of the week is probably Sunday because it means I can sit in my garden and just listen to birdsong without having constant background noise from chainsaws, circular saws, trimmers and other equipment as there is a no-noise policy here one day per week. We have an extremely wide range of wildlife […]

This weekend was supposed to be very wet and we almost didn’t go to the house. France and Germany have both had floods and we were expecting the same. However, despite the occasional short, hard downpour, it was scorching hot. My garden is completely overgrown but this week I discovered that the engine of my […]

For the last few days we’ve had nothing but rain. During early summer we get scorching hot mornings and then massive storms in the afternoons. Today while out checking my trail camera I was surrounded by Fire Salamanders (Salamandra salamandra). These are one of my favourite creatures in the Carpathian Forests. They’re very slow, docile […]