Cheers for getting back to me so quick!
Red, any pine tar would be great and yes I'm always after beeswax, the rawer the better.
Toddy, Raw stuff is what I'm after as its the faffing about is what I enjoy most! In a vaguely normal world we would go for a bimble and collect some but in the cast its not happening and if I send the family they come back with it mainly on their clothes and with all the tips missing from their penknives... Mind you the woods we normally harvest up at Clough Bottom have been extensively felled over the last year. I'm not sure there's enough left to call it a wood anymore!
The family did go off and harvest some soft rushes for me from up there but once again it was a very poor crop, no really large examples were to be had and I barely got a couple of hundred usable for watch lights and rush dips. On that vague note I did try and make some lights and dips suitable for use in museum displays, ie not using quick rotting animal fats. I'd bought some vegetable oil based sterine for another project so tried dipping the rushes in that. Unfortunately a single dip in pure sterine produced something that just didn't look right, all crystalline and brittler than when made from animal fat. They burned really well, sloped at 45% even thin dips burned at over a minute a inch. But they just didn't look right so I threw a bar of beef dripping into my improvised gresset and gave everything a second dip in 75% animal fat/25 % vegetable . Normally I don't dip twice as the slight increase in flame size/light and increase in burn time do not merit the extra effort and materials used up.
I'll get my coat...
and if you're up for cleaning some up for yourself, I'm pretty sure there's a tub with some raw stuff in the shed.....and I can find it too 
