Thursday 6 November 2014

Rolls-Royce fuels the future for bushcraft

With our saws sharpened, the marshmallows ready to toast and a sunny day of hard work ahead, we met our team of enthusiastic volunteers from Rolls-Royce plc who joined us to help with some essential improvements to our bushcraft site.

With over 3000 students visiting our Folly Farm education centre each year and bushcraft one of our most popular day and residential visits, we really needed to expand our sites and get them ready for a full year ahead.  The Rolls-Royce team had got in touch and offered their team as volunteers to help us out 



The team got stuck right in and soon had a parachute canopy up in the trees that will provide shelter on particularly rainy days keeping us lighting fires whatever the weather.  



Two fantastic log stores were built with the addition of a clever water collecting system so that we had plenty of rainwater to put out our fires in the future and plenty of space for logs to fuel our fires.



A team of tree fellers were busy felling trees as part of our winter management plan, making sure to use every part of the tree with logs stacked in our new log stores and smaller branches left for the children to make shelters.  




After all that hard work and with the sites looking so great we all had a chance to test our own survival skills by lighting fires with fire steels and cooking Bannock bread over the fire and toast those marshmallows.






What better way to test out our new sites than with 44 children from Stonham Aspal primary school who were staying at the centre all week for their school residential.  With so many fresh branches around, the shelters were some of the best we've seen and as one boy put it "I wish I could live in here for the rest of the week".
With our new hand washing stations and outdoors kitchens the children learnt how to make their own bread and cook it over their fires, which roared with all the fresh wood that had been collected for them.  

A huge thank you to the team at Rolls-Royce, we can't wait to welcome more groups to our fantastic bushcraft site and get more children outdoors and engaged with nature.

Jo Taylor, Learning Development Manager