Can we deal with the industrial quantities of firewood allegedly required? Just re-reading Smoke in the Lanes by Dominic Reeve and he and his Gypsy companions seemed to live with a fire wherever they stopped with the wood being mostly sticks pulled from hedges and deadfalls from tresspassed woods. Doubt if he used an axe or a splitter in his life.
If living in a roundhouse then a stick fire will do all you want in terms of heating and cooking. English peasants rarely burnt roundwood but relied on brushwood faggots and sticks. Of course easily accessible wood will used up but I presume you are allowed to wander a bit afield and bear fardels home.
You will need an insane amount of brush wood in order to keep just from literally freezing during winter (assuming you stay right next to the fire). Trying to heat a room with brush wood would require a person to constantly tend to the fire, and then ten more people whose full time job is to gather brush wood. If you are just walking around is summer, then you don't need much wood as the fire is not all that necessary. I get the feeling many accounts are very non-specific about temperatures, wind conditions, etc.
You know, with all this going back to nature stuff and living off the land or primitively, we don't have to speculate or rely on books or guess work. We all have the means to ascertain with great certainty how well such a project will work. I'm sure that we all have vacation days. For anyone curious, take a week to ten days off sometime in February or March, take the tools you think you will need for fire, shelter making, hunting, etc, and go into your local woods. Go back home ten days later and record how things went. How much game were you able to hunt? How warm were you? How much wood did you find you needed? We can get fairly good data, certainly much better than extrapolating from a weekend trip we did in the summer, or from some book that some guy wrote about some other people.
