Call of the wild (From The Northern Echo)

Call of the wild

4:25pm Tuesday 17th January 2012 in Lifestyle

Why would a City finance chief abandon the money game to follow in the outdoor footsteps of Ray Mears? Mark Patterson reports.

WHAT makes a man give up a £250,000 career in the City to teach people how to build fires in the wild? The answer is a yearning desire to get closer to the natural world, and more natural ways of living, that make an office-bound life seem tame – regardless of the money.

Such is the case with Paul Kirtley, from Stainton, near Barnard Castle, who spent ten years working as a financial analyst and fundmanager in London before giving it all up to work as an outdoors expert, teaching people skills such as how to light fires, build shelters, forage for wild food and navigate their way to safety.

It’s the kind of activity that Ray Mears has made familiar via his popular series of outdoor survival TV programmes over the past few years. And Kirtley, who is 38, knows Mears well, having worked for his company Woodlore after leaving his job in the City in 2006. However, after four years as course director for Mears, Kirtley left to set up his own venture called Frontier Bushcraft and so began competing with the handful of other UK businesses which make a living from this specialised area.

Modern Britain does not, let us admit, possess vast areas of wilderness in which rugged individuals depend on knowing how to make a fire from scratch. These days many of us can fall to bits at the prospect of losing the mobile phone charger.

Even so, there is a small, but growing, demand to acquire outdoor skills, and not from scary camouflage-clad survivalist types. Or at least not from them alone.

These days, the people who pay good money for a five or six-day elementary wilderness bushcraft course are more likely to be parents who want to learn more about the natural world and share their knowledge with their children; or people who desire to rekindle their youthful experiences of Scouting; or those who otherwise spend most of their times in an office and feel completely cut off from the natural world.

“Certainly, one thing I’ve noticed is that we seem to get a lot of people who work in IT, who are in front of screens, who are removed, I suppose, from any vestige of the natural world in their job and feel that need,” says Kirtley.

“Then I guess we’ve had this whole rise of people like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, with his River Cottage programmes, which aren’t about survival, but do emphasise foraging.

People are interested in going for walks in the countryside and asking ‘what can I take home to put in a salad?’ or ‘what can I use to make jam?’ ‘THERE are various motivations. You have people who want to learn survival skills because they are going on trips to dangerous places. Or, it’s the same mentality of people as wanting to learn first aid skills. It’s ‘just in case’.”

Kirtley’s own love of the natural world was forged in part by his childhood and youth in County Durham, which took in hiking, camping trips and mountain biking in Hamsterley Forest and Weardale. His parents moved to Stainton when he was ten when his father Tom, who is from Teesside, got a job as an engineer with GlaxoSmithKline in Barnard Castle.

Young Kirtley attended Green Lane Junior School and Teesside Comprehensive and then went to Edinburgh University to study mathematics.

The degree helped him get his first job in London as a financial advisor on £20,000. Ten years later he was earning £250,000 a year (before tax, including bonuses and share options) as an analyst with an investment company.

Although, in some respects, he always felt out of place in the City, he swears it wasn’t like the film Wall Street. “Yes, there are bankers who get millions of pounds in bonuses, but most people in the City don’t earn anywhere near that amount of money,” he says. “But there are also many people in IT and administration who earn a reasonable wage, and so the vast majority of people feel misrepresented by this ‘evil bankers’ kind of view there is in the press.

“That said, there are people who are very money-driven, very cut-throat, and will take big risks. But it’s a big industry and one of the things I always said when I was at university was that nobody in careers advice was everable to explain what people in the City actually do. The side of the fence I was working on was a bit more relaxed. People have this view of the City as massive football-pitch sized trading floors with people on phones screaming at each other like you see on the Wall Street movies with Gordon Gecko. And yes, those things do exist, but it’s not all like that.”

Kirtley had always regarded working in finance as a means to an end and throughout his City career he had spent his holidays outdoors, developing his interest in bushcraft skills.

Eventually, he also began taking courses with Ray Mears, who was then relatively unknown.

When Kirtley finally decided he’d had enough of the City he already had savings behind him. But there had been no flash City lifestyle for him.

As he says: “I was a down-to-earth outdoorsy type who happened to be earning good money and I was putting my money aside, always with that idea that I would be exiting at some point.”

Having developed a good relationship with Mears, Kirtley left his City job knowing that he was going to begin a new £40,000-a-year job with Mears’ company Woodlore. But, even with the savings, wasn’t he anxious about swapping the City for such a relatively unusual kind of employment?

ANY trepidation he felt was counterbalanced by the call of the wild and the desire to get off the City treadmill. On top of that, his father Tom, suffered a minor stroke at 57 – an event that underlined Kirtley’s feeling that you should chase your dreams now, not put them off.

“He’s okay now, he was lucky,” says Kirtley, “but that to me clarified my feelings that my dad’s worked hard all my life, waiting for this time when he can do things he really wants to do – and then that happens. So I thought I didn’t want to defer my life any more by doing something I didn’t want to do.”

Kirtley worked hard at Woodlore for four years, leaving in November 2010 to set up Frontier Bushcraft. He now employs a handful of former Woodlore instructors on a part-time basis, including another County Durham lad, Steven Suggett, from Crook.

Mears was, says Kirtley, a “hard taskmaster”

and it sounds as if the job with Woodlore took a certain toll. This may explain Kirtley’s delicate explanation that one reason he left Mears’ employment was to address his “work-life balance thing”.

Then again, bushcraft instruction is not just about sitting around in woods rubbing sticks together. The hours are long and instructors can spend weeks camped out with clients without seeing home.

The longest stretch Kirtley has spent in the field is eight weeks, followed by a few days off, followed by another six weeks. But this is the life he’s chosen and he’s clearly not complaining.

Just the opposite, in fact.

Asking Kirtley why it is important that people today acquire bushcraft skills – how to handle and maintain an axe properly, how to find and purify water, how to start fires using a bowdrill – is an invitation for him to talk fluently and at length about the need, essentially, for all of us to bring the natural world closer to the centre of our lives.

“I think,” he says, “that what comes from an understanding of bushcraft is that you value natural resources much more. Why do people want to do this? One reason is that they want nature to be a bigger part of their lives. ”

He currently teaches his UK courses in east Sussex. Would he consider running them near home, in County Durham?

“I would like to run some courses up North, but it’s all about finding an amenable landowner.

A lot of my learning was down in the south of England, and Sweden, and when I’ve gone back to places afterwards I’ve seen so much more. That’s true even of places I played in as a kid, where I was familiar with the plants and trees.

“There’s a place near my parents in the spring where you get pignuts – hundreds and hundreds of them. They must always have been there, but I never noticed them before.”