Tucked up in our homes and cars most of us know next to nothing about how to survive in the great outdoors. We could no more make a woodland shelter, light a fire or find food than fly to the moon. Natural living expert Hannah Nicholls runs courses in the heart of the Kent countryside teaching those forgotten survival skills as David Scholefield reports.

Imagine you had to spend a day, or maybe two, in the wild. Would you be able to recognise the tracks of a wild animal, find dry wood in the rain or build somewhere safe and warm to sleep?

If not, Hannah Nicholls would be a good woman to have at your side.

She teaches bushcraft, the art of looking after yourself in the natural environment, and survival skills at Natural Pathways, based in woodland around Canterbury.

Having learned her skills in America, on a year-long survival skills course in the UK and in the Australian rainforest, she is an expert in sustainable living.

Hannah’s students include people from all walks of life, from keen walkers and backpackers who want to be better equipped, to parents who want their children to be confident sleeping out under the stars. Teachers and youth workers also use the courses to broaden pupils’ education, and give youngsters the benefit of learning to work together as a team in an outdoor environment.

Natural Pathways teaches everything from basic survival, covering essentials like shelter building, fire lighting, water collection and purification and native cooking methods to intensive weekends learning animal tracking.

On a tracking course, students learn 15 steps which turn them into competent animal trackers in three days. They are taught how to read the landscape and everything that moves through it, and also to use a tracking stick, an aid to help measure footprints and discover the faint marks that an untrained eye would miss.

Families can also learn together at a Wilderness Family Camp. Most parents feel faint at the thought of children handling knives or tending fires. But taught properly they learn to respect them and can be perfectly safe. Recently she has started woman-only courses, teaching survival skills in small female groups. Making strings and cord out of plant fibres and learning to filter river water for drinking are among the subjects covered.

I’ve a fire in my hands!

“How are we going to light a fire then, if we haven’t got any matches?” my seven-year-old son asks me. I have to admit I haven’t a clue. He is carrying a bag of marshmallows and is clearly worried.

I am taking Bryn and his sister Rebecca, nine, to meet bushcraft expert Hannah Nicolls, who is going to show us the safe way to mix children and fire, and already I am feeling like a helpless townie.

That feeling increases as we pass perfectly-constructed little shelters between the trees in the woodlands east of Canterbury.

In the woods, Hannah greets us and takes us to a clearing. We need to find dead wood, still on the trees, she explains. We start breaking off twigs and branches, and sorting it as we have been told, into matchstick, pencil and finger thicknesses.

Bryn and Rebecca are happily digging out the firepit with sticks while I am told to pile up the damp soil as a fire blanket to smother the flames later.

“One rule of bushcraft is leave no trace,” Hannah explains. “We are going to build a teepee fire, the easiest to light. Take handfuls of matchstick-thick twigs and put them down in a cone,” Hannah tells the children.

“The next size is pencil thin, put down one at a time.” We leave a gap at one side, which is the door to our teepee. Then the thickest twigs go on, each layer lights the next.

Our instructor takes out a little tin, filled with dry, soft tinder. “In bushcraft we are always collecting tinder and keeping it dry. This is dandelion tops, thistledown, reed mace heads, the seeds of rosebay willowherb and bark – particularly birch bark, peel off the loose stuff and it will always burn,” she says.

Hannah makes a nest out of hay and puts a little of her tinder inside. Then she produces a fire steel and shows Bryn and Rebecca how to scrape the metal rod with the metal blade. Sparks fly on to a square of charred cloth and it starts to glow. We stuff it into the tinder bundle.

Now the children take it and start to blow, breathing in through their noses and leaning back so as not to swallow smoke. At first the nest glows, then it smokes, then it bursts into flame.

“I’ve never held a fire in my hands!” says Rebecca and under Hannah’s instruction she bends slowly down and puts the tinder bundle by the entrance to our twig teepee where it is pushed in with a stick.

They eagerly stoke the fire as Hannah teaches them to make charcloth, putting a piece of cloth in a tin with a pinhole in the lid. Pushed into embers, we watch for the smoke from the pinhole. Later it is pulled from the fire and the hole sealed with a twig or the charred material could ignite. When it is cool, it can be opened and the charred cloth is inside, ready to light another fire.

Time to enjoy our efforts. Bryn opens his bag and we sit back in the quiet, pushing marshmallows onto pointed sticks and toasting them. Luckily, that’s one thing I do know how to do.

Courses available at Natural Pathways range from a three-day family wilderness camp to a flint knapping course and tracking. Children’s mini survival courses cost £14 per child. The course this weekend is fully booked but there is availability for Saturday, March 24. For more information go towww.natural-pathways.co.uk