Practical resources for Scout leaders, including badge guidance, activity ideas, teaching tips, safety advice and resources to help Scouts develop essential skills.
Making your own tent pegs is a simple campcraft skill that is surprisingly satisfying. You don’t need much equipment, and once you know what makes a good peg, you can make one to suit the ground and the shelter you’re putting up. A homemade wooden peg doesn’t need to look perfect. In fact, a roughly…
A sharp knife is generally easier and more controlled to use than a blunt one, but sharpening is a skill in its own right. A blunt blade often encourages people to use more force, which can make slips more likely and makes simple camp tasks harder than they need to be. You don’t need complicated…
If you are somewhere with a mobile signal but cannot make a voice call to the emergency services, the UK’s Emergency SMS service can provide another way to contact 999. It can be particularly useful for people who are deaf, hard of hearing or have a speech impairment, but it can also provide an alternative…
Water purification tablets are a useful way of treating water when you’re camping, hiking or travelling somewhere that you cannot rely on the water supply. They are small, lightweight and easy to carry, which makes them particularly useful as a backup to a filter or as part of an emergency water-treatment kit. The important thing…
A water filter can make collecting water outdoors much easier, particularly on longer walks, camping trips and adventures where carrying all the water you need isn’t practical. Rather than carrying several litres from the start, you can collect water from a suitable source and filter it as you need it. However, using a filter isn’t…
A fire-lighting kit doesn’t need to be complicated and it doesn’t need to have too much equipment. In fact, one of the best kits is small enough to keep in a pocket or a corner of your rucksack and contains a few different ways of getting a fire started rather than relying on one single…
Snow can look like one of the least useful materials for building a shelter, but when it is deep enough and properly packed, it can provide surprisingly good insulation. A well-built snow shelter can block wind and trap warmth far more effectively than you might expect for something so cold. There are several types of…
A debris shelter is a simple woodland shelter made mainly from natural materials such as branches, leaves, moss and other fallen vegetation. It is one of the more interesting shelter-building skills to practise because the materials are all around you, but making a shelter that actually keeps you warm and reasonably dry takes more than…
What if learning outdoor skills wasn’t just about reading an article and moving on? What if you could actually build your skills, track your progress, take on challenges and see how far you’ve come? That’s what we’re building here at Survival Guides UK. We’ve been adding new tools and features to turn the site into…
Whether you’re heading up a fell, camping in the Highlands or just want to be ready for a winter power cut, knowing the right outdoor skills conditions demand can make a real difference. Our weather is cold, wet and changeable here in the UK, and most outdoor emergencies here start with something small: a wrong…
