Bushcraft Courses, Bushcraft Qualifications, Ancestral Skills, Foraging & Craft Courses in Kent
Jack Raven Bushcraft Blog
Our blog is regularly updated with posts covering many aspects of bushcraft, craft and foraging. Click on the photo below to take a look.
Course Calendar
Take a look at our course calendar to see what we’ve got going on.
About our bushcraft courses
Founded in 2011 by Gary and Nicola, Jack Raven Bushcraft courses take place in beautiful Westwell, Kent, UK, just 50 miles from the centre of London with easy access by both rail and road.
We run the majority of our bushcraft courses in a stunning 35 acre private ancient broadleaf woodland on the Kent Downs, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  We’re great fans of the British countryside and have travelled extensively throughout it. We can say in all honesty that our location is as beautiful as anywhere we’ve been.
We have around 25 species of native trees, more species of wildflowers than we’ve been able to count, woodpeckers, tawny owls, little owls, sparrow hawks, buzzards, tits, jays, fallow deer, badgers, stoats, foxes, weasels, squirrels…and on it goes.
You don’t need any previous outdoor experience to take part in one of our bushcraft courses and all of our training sessions are entirely hands on so that you leave Jack Raven Bushcraft with simple, practical and repeatable skills.
Low number of participants
We keep our course numbers low. On most of our courses we take a maximum of 8 students, on the rest it’s lower still. We have no interest in pushing large numbers of people through our courses on a conveyor belt. It would be harmful to our woodland for one thing, but would also prevent the intimacy and camaraderie that’s such a big part of our courses.
Excellent facilities
We think that for you to effectively learn the skills we’re teaching, your basic needs have to be satisfied. So we want to keep you warm and dry. We have a yurt and wood burning stove for when it gets chilly and a composting loo so there’s no need to go wandering off at night to dig a hole. (In reality, people don’t tend to wander far in the dark and the camp could become a minefield!)
Wonderful food
It might not be at the top of the list, but we think that keeping you well fed is important. We are consistently praised for the quality of the meals we serve on our overnight courses and have been told on numerous occasions (at least once by a professional chef) that the food we serve is restaurant quality. Bearing in mind we cook everything from scratch in the woods, that’s no mean feat.
Conservation
We place a strong emphasis on natural history, woodland management and conservation on everything we do as we believe that this knowledge should inform everything we do in bushcraft, both in the UK and abroad.
What happens on a Jack Raven Bushcraft course?
Preserving our woodland
Preserving and enhancing the woodland in which we teach is a prime consideration for us and is factored into everything we do. Whilst you may be familiar with the bushcraft adage “Leave no trace”, we are determined that when we eventually move on the woodland will be in a better condition than when we first arrived.
To that end we routinely maintain the rides, coppice the hazel, sweet chestnut and hornbeam and have recently planted a significant number of trees to replace ash that has succumbed to die back.
We want to make sure that we not only preserve the ancient woodland in which we work but also enhance it wherever we can and to pass that philosophy on to our customers.
Reviews
We’re extremely confident with the quality of the bushcraft courses we run and allow our customers to submit reviews to our website without any editing on our part.  Take a look for yourself on any course page and you can read exactly what other people think of our courses (as a heads up, we have hundreds of reviews and they’re all 5 star). We also have reviews on our Facebook page and our Google Business page so you can check out those as well.
Take a look around our website and if you have any questions on our bushcraft courses, corporate team building activities, events, or need more information about anything, then don’t hesitate to contact us.
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