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, […]

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 […]

As we regularly do, this year we decided to spend a week in Croatia relaxing by the sea. There’s nowhere in Europe quite like it – either for the varied and spectacular scenery or for the crystal clear water. This year we returned to the Isle of Pag, a few miles from the resort town […]

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 […]

Never a dull day. I could hear something flapping around in the kids’ room and I thought it was the blinds due to the wind. I was wrong. This poor little Swift (Apus apus) (which has a nest just outside and above the window) had got in and was panicking to get out. I wore […]

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 […]