Always take a compass

23rd August 2014 - Black Mountains circular walk from Crickhowell
"What about a day trip to the mountains somewhere - we haven't been in ages" was Donna's suggestion when trying to think of things do over the upcoming bank holiday weekend, a great idea!   For good reason, we hadn't climbed anything higher than a staircase since Donna was pregnant with Isabelle (who's now 4.5 months old) and my parents we're more than happy to entertain her for the day while we took Monty, our English Springer Spaniel, on the 2hr ish drive to Crickhowell for a 9 mile circular walk in the Black Mountains.
We picked the Black Mountains for a number of reasons; it's probably the closest area of decent hills/mountains to us, the drive just about ok for a "there and back" trip in a day and we haven't really walked much in the Black Mountains - our only decent walk there was back in April 2012 (you can read about that here).
So after packing up the car with walking…

I was asked along to 10th Romsey (Crusoe) Troop' summer camp to teach some of the bushcraft skills that I'd learnt and practiced on my recent course with Frontier Bushcraft.

This year's summer camp was a local event being held in the grounds of the troops' scout hall so with no new areas to explore the leaders wanted something new and interesting for the scouts to focus on while the aerial run way was constructed and lunch cooked!

My plan was to show them how to make some cordage from nettles and then use this to try and lift one of the 3 kettle bells (8kg, 12kg and 20kg) that I had taken along for the challenge.
After this I wanted to show them how to make tent pegs from the hazel branches that are plentiful in the scout hall grounds.




The 12 scouts had collected 5-10 nettles each earlier that morning so they hadn't had time to dry out and become brittle.  The first task was to show them how (with gloves for them!) to safely remove the spines and leaves and crush the…