Habitat with most odds off obtaining all your wild food needs in the U.K.

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Van-Wild

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I recommend the Norfolk Broads. Take a canoe, or you can hire one very easily there. Go in the winter or spring. In the summer it will be too busy with river cruisers. There's a lot of water to be travelled and loads of places where you can just tie up and camp beside the river (not recommended, you need permission first....) there are some small islands that you could camp on, Google maps is your friend. Loads of day tickets for fishing. No trout, but Pike and Perch about.
 
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demented dale

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Towns and the urban environment would be your best bet for survival foraging.
The amount of food that supermarkets throw out the back would feed a family for ages.
lol. I thought this thread was about food in the wild in a survival situation. Ok,so now I'm having shoplifting and standing outside the cake shop with a club. Only joking. This subject merits a discussion in it's own right. Although maybe on UK Preppers. forum.
 
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demented dale

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We do get horrendously bad weather along our coasts though....my Dad said that the ice froze so hards on the Norfolk Broads one year that when it thawed it took away the eelgrass, that the elvers needed to hide/grow in, out to sea. Pretty much destroyed an entire industry.

On Skara Brae there are stone 'cisterns' in the houses. Older folks on the islands said that inland houses had these to keep sea molluscs fresh.....well the now coastal Skara Brae site was originally inland a bit. If you collect a lot of the shellfish, you could keep them fresh for a day or so in what would really be a kind of rock pool. Handy if the weather looked like it was going to be bad.
I remember being on Orkneys and going to those places and the Megalith complexes. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think you would struggle to find anything to eat inland today. I remember it being quite barren and devoid of trees. Interesting that Skara Brae is now coastal. How far inland was it? That would suggest that there was food inland at the time. Were they farmers or herders? I was certain that it was the sea that sustained the people all those years ago but maybe the environment was very different once. Please tell me if anyone knows. x.
 
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Toddy

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Skara Brae was a neolithic settlement. They were farmers who had a mix of agriculture and animal husbandry.
They grew oats and barley, and reared sheep and cattle and (some, not sure just how much this was a big part; later on in Scotland pigs were not well thought of, and the native one was called a grice. Pigs need shelter, they're not as hardy as sheep. The grice was a hairy breed, but small and wiry ) pigs.
They would still hunt wildfowl, take seabirds eggs, and fish. Gather wild fruits in season.
 
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Poacherman

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lol. I thought this thread was about food in the wild in a survival situation. Ok,so now I'm having shoplifting and standing outside the cake shop with a club.
I believe he’s referring to a topic called freeganism were people go in bins reusing waste. I seen a documentary were a guy got his food n clothes from clothing outlet bins ect. But that was way back in 2009 but that’s another subject entirely .
 

Poacherman

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I recommend the Norfolk Broads. Take a canoe, or you can hire one very easily there. Go in the winter or spring. In the summer it will be too busy with river cruisers. There's a lot of water to be travelled and loads of places where you can just tie up and camp beside the river (not recommended, you need permission first....) there are some small islands that you could camp on, Google maps is your friend. Loads of day tickets for fishing. No trout, but Pike and Perch about.
I’m thinking getting one these new folding kayaks u can carry they are fabulous
 

Poacherman

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No, the eelgrass is the hiding place for the elvers, the little eels that grow up and then swim off all the way across to the Sargasso sea to spawn and die.....maybe thirty years later. The tiny wee eels are carried by ocean currents back to Norfolk.

There used to be hundreds of thousands of those elvers, they're kind of transparent when young and called glass eels. Now I believe they're on the endangered species list.
Yes I used to eat eels my grandad told me it was legal even though it was not funny bloke .
 

demented dale

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I believe he’s referring to a topic called freeganism were people go in bins reusing waste. I seen a documentary were a guy got his food n clothes from clothing outlet bins ect. But that was way back in 2009 but that’s another subject entirely .
I know. I was joking. It is a good subject though and one worthy of discussion.
 
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Suffolkrafter

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In these sorts of discussions, people rarely mention insects, ants, ant eggs, earth worms, snails and slugs and so on, from a survival perspective. Admitidly, from the point of view of this thread, they are not really location specific. I'm one and a half series into Alone, and they barely feature there either. Is there any evidence of prehistoric people eating these? Or do they just not provide enough calories to be worthwhile?
I think I would also choose the coastal areas of East Anglia. Combination of wetlands, woodland, lakes and rivers and the sea.
 

Toddy

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I think that's one of the 'absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence', especially since we know that worldwide eating insects was /is common and nutritious.

We don't really have a massive edible insect population here though. Locusts apparently taste of butter :dunno: they don't live here.
Ants eggs we know can be eaten, so can various larvae.
Worms ? what evidence would be left ?
Frogs ? snails ? common enough on the continent still.

I think that's a probable yes to eating such things in the past, but mind, there's the whole human thing about somethings being a hard 'no'.
Brits don't eat horses, dogs and donkeys kind of thing.

There are tales of Celtic peoples who didn't eat fish.
I'm allergic to fish, so suppose someone like me came along, and I'm not alone in my allergy, and a whole family group/clan decided that fish were a hard 'no'.....over the generations that whole nutritious food becomes not food.

We just don't know enough to be absolutely definite about what folks did and didn't eat, unless we get analysis of their bones/teeth. That can give very clear clues to what they ate, well some of it anyway.

We can say what was available, what we would, now, consider edible.

I would remind us all that we are the Cooking Ape, we can make pretty much anything edible by cooking it first, even bone breaks down. You can roast the inner bark of trees and grind it for flour.....the list goes on.

M
 

demented dale

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Skara Brae was a neolithic settlement. They were farmers who had a mix of agriculture and animal husbandry.
They grew oats and barley, and reared sheep and cattle and (some, not sure just how much this was a big part; later on in Scotland pigs were not well thought of, and the native one was called a grice. Pigs need shelter, they're not as hardy as sheep. The grice was a hairy breed, but small and wiry ) pigs.
They would still hunt wildfowl, take seabirds eggs, and fish. Gather wild fruits in season.
Thanks Toddy, Would there have been trees there at that time? and were the people that lived at Skara Brae the same ones that built the Stone circles and Maes Howe? x
 

Toddy

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There would have been trees, though it is believed that the woodlands were being diminished by the time of the changes, the agriculture, of the Neolithic.

"The term ‘native’ is usually used to describe the species that developed after the last Ice Age (some 10,000 years ago) without the interference of human beings. For Orkney, these species are generally agreed to be Downy Birch, Hazel, Rowan, Aspen, Willows, Roses, Honeysuckle and Juniper. "

There are quite long running projects to reforest parts of Orkney, using native trees....as in native to the islands, not just native to Scotland.

Sorry, I know the background but it wasn't my focus so I'm light on detail.
This site however is rich in that :)
 

demented dale

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In these sorts of discussions, people rarely mention insects, ants, ant eggs, earth worms, snails and slugs and so on, from a survival perspective. Admitidly, from the point of view of this thread, they are not really location specific. I'm one and a half series into Alone, and they barely feature there either. Is there any evidence of prehistoric people eating these? Or do they just not provide enough calories to be worthwhile?
I think I would also choose the coastal areas of East Anglia. Combination of wetlands, woodland, lakes and rivers and the sea.
You are right. Not many people mention it but people always have and continue to eat that stuff right up to today particularly in Asia. I had insect ice cream once and ate grasshoppers in Uganda. It is a good source of protein. I watched the locals catching them. They got a decent amount in not a lot of time. I have found and listed as many edible insects as I can for my bush craft folder. I could eat anything if it came to it except slugs.
 

demented dale

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There would have been trees, though it is believed that the woodlands were being deminished by the time of the changes, the agriculture, of the Neolithic.

"The term ‘native’ is usually used to describe the species that developed after the last Ice Age (some 10,000 years ago) without the interference of human beings. For Orkney, these species are generally agreed to be Downy Birch, Hazel, Rowan, Aspen, Willows, Roses, Honeysuckle and Juniper. "

There are quite long running projects to reforest parts of Orkney, using native trees....as in native to the islands, not just native to Scotland.

Sorry, I know the background but it wasn't my focus so I'm light on detail.
This site however is rich in that :)
Thanks for that and coming full circle to the topic it was once a good place to survive but harder now.
 

slowworm

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I doubt the legalities but I started this thread purely for fun what habitat do u think offers highest prospects off survival in the U.K?or Europe even .
If we're doubting legalities then round here there's plenty of sheep and cattle about the place to tuck into. Quite often wondering about my woods uninvited...

If you can beat the squirrels too them there's plenty of hazel nuts in the coastal valleys round here. Plenty of shellfish on our local beaches, but the pollution would prevent me from eating things like mussels. And pollution has killed most things in our local streams.

I do wonder what it would have been like 200 years ago around here. The streams were full of trout apparently and I do wonder how many fish could have been caught from the shore before overfishing. Even now you occasionally get shoals of mackerel so dense they can be grabbed from the shore and hundreds of sprats left on the shore so it could have been quite easy to catch dinner a few centuries ago.
 
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