Bushcraft as cultural continuity in ‘English’ hunter-gathering

This paper argues that the relationship bushcraft creates between artisan, landscape and tools to enable the acquisition of food and spatial mobility expresses a broadly-based environmental cultural continuity in English foraging practices. The perspective of bushcraft practitioners has rarely been represented in academic literature, partly, perhaps, because it cuts across many different sectors of research and practice. Accordingly, we bring a transdisciplinary approach, utilising queer theory and trans theory as a helpful methodology for examining marginalised communities. Recognising the problematic nature of ‘slippery’ terms like ‘bushcraft’, ‘hunter-gatherer’, and ‘Indigenous’, we explain the key concepts and terms used to delineate an ethos of ‘discontinuous continuity’ in bushcraft practices over time. Limiting our geographical context to England, we provide a historical record of the disenfranchisement of endemic English people from their traditional rights to hunting and gathering, subsequently extended under Norman rule by Forest Law, demonstrating a detailed record of increasing suppression of local traditional foraging practices in the early Medieval period. We focus first on the historical record of these practices before making comparisons with those in the prehistoric Mesolithic, to counter ethnonationalist fantasies of ‘Englishness’ as defined by unbroken racial or linguistic purity. Moving to the modern period, we identify this continuity of foraging as forms of knowledge, practice and a counter-cultural movement, represented by the contemporary bushcraft movement’s creation of a place for reconnection with traditional knowledge. We thereby challenge pop-survival television’s depiction of bushcraft, which positions the natural world as dangerous and something to be feared. Current restrictions on land-use act against this reclamation and exploration of foraging skills in England. Nevertheless, contemporary bushcraft provides a valuable education in resilience and a sustaining vision of kinship between those wishing to re-establish at least some parts of the knowledge and skillsets which were once the only means to survive and thrive in the English landscape.