Reading Time: 10 minutesAs I drove up the track, I saw Helen. She waved at me from behind a full-sized skip bag of, what could be, the softest British wool – Ryeland wool. Fifteen Ryeland fleeces in a big sack. We exchanged talk about the journey over, then she said ‘I decided I might as well add in […]
Landscape and Nature
Charcuterie in the Pantry: The Meat Cure
Reading Time: 5 minutesCharcuterie in the pantry or larder. That’s what charcuterie has always been made for. For thousands of years we’ve been dry-curing and smoking meat (before we could import food from all around the world) because we needed to keep going in lean times. And lean times they were, as we had to produce from the […]
Store Cheese in the Pantry – Ditch the Fridge
Reading Time: 7 minutesCheese: take the milk, skim off the curds (solids) from the whey (liquids), press, ferment and age. Hey presto, you have a solid form of milk. We’ve long used this to extend its life and get us through lean times. A tradition thousands of years old. Store cheese in the pantry, and it’ll taste and […]
Animals and Ancestors: A Life Lived With Animals
Reading Time: 2 minutesCould a life lived with animals be in our DNA? We’ve evolved from hunter-gathers, into farmers looking out onto pasture, cornfield, hedgerow and wildwood beyond. Today the wildwood has retreated, and for most of us even farms too. We live in an increasingly artificial environment, and few of us live off the land. Yet we […]
Wildwood, Tree Rings, Climate and Environment
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThe life a forest has seen is written into its wood. Rising and falling temperature, water availability, the affect of people living at its edge; tales of bark chewing deer and clouds of insects too. All leave their mark in tree rings. The signature of wildwood, climate change, insects and people; of oakwood and birchwood. […]
Do We Need to Revive Traditional Knowledge to Live Well for the Future?
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe best of the past for the future. That’s what I want to focus on this year.
When I started this blog, I never thought of it as relating to my working life. But, as time goes on I’ve found it sneaking in. I’m a cross between an archaeologist and an ecologist, and so I’ve found the phrases ‘ancient knowledge, passed down through generations’ slipping in.
