Ladies and Gentlemen, I humbly submit for your judgement my first attempt at this challenge. I was away on a re-enacting event this weekend and thought I'd go all out authentic. I relied on the kit in my primitive camping kit thread and pitched my shelter in the dark on Friday night. The event was part of a French and Indian War re-enactment in the Kent town of Westerham next to the childhood home of General Wolfe. We were camped in a field with some woods behind us and had a fairly nice area. I put together a fairly rudimentary lean to and settled for some sleep, during the night it started raining and my tarp revealed several leaky patches but nothing above a gentle drip and I was able to move out of the way for a fairly good nights kip. I used my whitney blanket with a 5x5 piece of heavy wool broadcloth for a little extra warmth around my legs and my heavy wool shirt for upper body warmth. This created a few problems as the blankets slide over each other and I struggled to construct my usual blanket cocoon so I will need to look at solutions for that at some point. I had my pack as a pillow and wore a furry hat for a little extra padding and warmth.
Saturday we did our re-enactey thing and a good time was had by all, I brought an old cast iron wok as a fire pit and used a simple tripod of branches to cook bacon in the morning and a nice beef stew with a drop of red wine for dinner. Sunday night was a more eventful experience as I was woken by a young fox jumping on my tarp and having a jolly good time doing it. I scared it off with a couple of gently thrown twigs and settled back to sleep only to be awoken by said fox snuffling around my hat (its face a couple of inches from mine as I spun round to see what it was will stay with me for a while, imagine waking up to find Mick Hucknall trying to get into bed with you and you'll have some idea). I scared it away a little more vigorously this time and settled back down for another couple of hours.
Today it rained like mad, luckily I had rearranged the shelter to be a little more effective and I had somewhere to stash my kit whilst we did our thing. Highlights of the weekend include sleeping in 1 3/4 blankets, practicing some skills and my run-in with the fox. Low-lights include cutting my hand on the flint of my musket and breaking the blade of my knife battoning some firewood. All in all a great weekend and some useful experience!
Now for a confession, on the basis that I wanted to make sure I got a decent nights sleep I did take some extra kit. On the pic above you can probably see a blue canoe bag which I brought as an 'emergency kit' (or rather 'ensuring I'm well for work on Monday kit') which consisted of a lightweight sleeping bag and bivvy bag in case the weather got really bad and my shelter proved insufficient. We were also not allowed to gather foliage etc for bedding and so I used an inflatable roll mat. I'm not sure if this therefore counts as completion of the challenge but as a first attempt I'm pretty happy. I'll try to follow up with more pics later in the week.