No stranger to spending her nights outdoors, Woodlore Aspirant Instructor and regular blogger Sarah Day shares her love of camping out under a tarp:

Sarah Day

Sleeping under a tarp is a daunting experience to the uninitiated – we are so used to having four walls and a floor (even when camping!) that going without seems ridiculous. However, most of the Woodlore Field Team camp out under tarps/ hootchies for at least some of the season, and they do bring several benefits.

I often find it difficult to sleep in a tent now; they can seem a bit airless after a tarp and, although on cold mornings the prospect of leaving a toasty warm sleeping bag is uninviting, once I’m up the cold is generally invigorating. I love lying in my sleeping bag, warm and comfortable breathing the sweet smelling air you only get after a night of gentle rain.

Tarps also force you to be organised with your kit. I always bring too much stuff with me – I’m often out for weeks at a time, but much of it is half-finished projects, books and examples of things for lectures. Being under a tarp makes it essential not only to be organised but to form out some sort of routine. At the end of a day I always put my kit in the same places, my fire flash and certain things from my pockets go into my hiking boots which have the insoles pulled out so they can air. My clothes are folded and put back in my rucksack and my head torch is looped round the drying line strung under the tarp. My Swannie is folded into a pillow with a shirt wrapped around it like a pillow case and my rucksack is propped up against a stick, purposely driven into the ground with my Swazi draped over it as a rain cover (especially if it’s still damp from a day of April showers). Because I follow the same pattern every evening, I know that my kit will be fine, whatever the weather. So, when I’m woken up in the middle of the night to the first pitter-patterings of a rain shower, I can lie there warm and smug, allowing the rain to lull me back to sleep.

A squirrel pup found at the course site

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With Woodlore’s 2012 course season now well underway, Aspirant Instructor Sarah Day shares her thoughts on working and living in the outdoors at this time of year:

Sarah Day

I started working at Woodlore in 2006. But since then I’ve not been able to work courses during the early part of the season due to other commitments. I think I’d forgotten just how much I love spring.

Watching summer mellow into autumn is a different affair, the last flush of colour before you wake up one morning and know the summer is over. The day when it seems the birch leaves have turned yellow and started to drop almost overnight; it always makes me feel a little sad. I love winter, and I love autumn but the end of the summer means the end of the course season and a few months until I’ll be back outdoors properly again.

Spring is a season of firsts – the first Woodlore course, the first butterflies and bluebells, the first bumblebees. The woods are so alive with the hustle and bustle of life that it’s impossible to ignore. The changes are so much more tangible than in other seasons too. For two weeks I watched buds on the beech tree near the store tent swelling almost imperceptibly, then burst into a riot of vivid green in the space of three days. The leaves start thin and crinkled, like a butterfly that’s just emerged from its chrysalis, but quickly spread into a beautiful emerald canopy, until the whole wood is dusted with a delicate sprinkling of green. It looks good enough to eat – and some of it is – nettles, hawthorn, dog rose shoots, ramsons and beech leaves are all spring delicacies.

The sun setting over one of Woodlore's bivi sites

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