Origins…
Predictably, the idea for BackWoods started during a late-night conversation around the campfire.
If you hadn’t already guessed, Billy, Becci, Lydia and Ed (the founding members) all met through Scouts – as teenagers their friendship started with wide games, climbing, cooking on fires, wild camping and… office chair jousting…
As Explorer Scouts (ages 14-18), their group were invited to volunteer on the Litter and Recycling Team at Towersey Festival (becoming known as the Towersey Wombles). It was here that they cemented their friendship, learning valuable teamwork and leadership skills, against the backdrop of music, tents, laughter and lanterns (and more than a few bins). This carried on well into their adulthood, and after 10 years supporting Towersey as part of the Wombles team, it was time to pass on the opportunity to a new (younger) group.
During this time, Billy had earned his degree in Commercial Horticulture and opened Stotts Nursery at Stokenchurch. The four and their friends regularly camped on the Nursery site, valued for its sense of freedom and natural beauty – and long evenings were spent by the fire, reminiscing about the past, and wondering about the future.
In 2018, Billy was thinking about building a space for teaching horticultural classes, and the idea was put forward that all four might put their combined skills and experience together to offer a range of outdoor-focused workshops and experiences – and BackWoods was born.
In 2019 they spent a very cold February weekend testing the first Campfire Cooking menu, and in the April, a team of volunteers helped paint and prepare the Workshop for its first use. In June that year, they ran a ‘soft-launch’ of Campfire Cooking, and they have never looked back! In September they built the axe-throwing range – like almost everything on the BackWoods site, it was hand-made from repurposed materials and full of rustic charm! The original log targets have since been replaced with newer, tougher (but still hand-made) A-frames with their huge, beautiful ash tree slices.
January 2020 brought a first for BackWoods – a Hen party of 22 visited to throw axes and learn some printmaking. Since then it has been a go-to choice for groups of all kinds to experience a slice of the outdoors for whatever occasion they are celebrating – especially over the past year or so.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, when groups of up to six were allowed to meet outdoors, BackWoods were thrilled to be able to offer outdoor axe-throwing workshops as a place for family and friends to meet and enjoy each other’s company for the first time in a while. They made use of their extensive outdoor space to later run horticultural workshops under an open-sided marquee, which has continued to be a fantastic space (and they don’t know why they didn’t think of it sooner!).
The BackWoods team continue to reinvest time and resources improving the programme and the site; at least two weekends every year are spent testing and trying new processes and ideas for workshops, and in July 2020 they finally completed the clay oven that started as just ‘something to do’ two years previously, but now feeds them with tasty pizza in their downtime from running workshops!
A New Era
In 2022 Ed and Lydia embarked on a new adventure in the North of England, so took the difficult decision to leave the team to enable them to get stuck into their new business. Becci and Billy continue to run BackWoods, constantly on the lookout for new workshop ideas to expand their repertoire. They have recently welcomed another of their scouting pals, Katie, into the team as Social Media Manager, giving them more time to devote to developing and running workshops.
