At meets it's interesting sometimes just how much knowledge there is when you get a dozen or so folk together. It's not just hunters, gatherers and craftsmen but all kinds of variants of each and more besides. Sometimes after four days we're just getting comfortable and there is a real feeling that given an appropriate site we could stay indefinately. Patrick calls us Bushcrofters which may be tongue in cheek but isn't far off the mark.
I kind of do have a site. Was wandering though a wood out at Scotties one day last year and discovered a roofless but relatively intact butt-and-ben. When I jokingly claimed it later his reaction was "Sure, why not, as neighbours go I could do worse.".
What stops me?
In the short term it's the unknown. I may have grown up secluded in the country but I'm not kidding myself that that gave me the knowledge and skills needed to just up sticks and leave the big bad world behind.
I'm also settled in my working environment but given the current climate that's not as secure as it once was.
Who knows, if work were to dry up....
...it's a nice daydream and given that I don't really have anything to stop me it's a daydream that I quite hope will come about one day. It's not really that unusual, there're plenty of folk out there living off-the-grid.
It'd be a crofting lifestyle rather than a bushcraft one though. The midgies pretty much ensure that. Without a midgie-proof building it'd be difficult. There's a good reason that the early local settlements were turf or rock with smoke filtering through the thatch.
