 Hi my name is Ross Boyer and I work as a wilderness guide and survival instructor. We're not in the wilderness at the moment but given a little bit of ingenuity we can practice some amazing skills right here in our back garden. This week myself and my girlfriend Claire are going to be showing you all sorts of things that we can do right here near the comfort of our own home. The first activity this week is shelter. Now when we think about making a shelter the first thing we have to do is think about what we're trying to protect ourselves against. If I was in the desert that would be the sun and the heat. If I was in the Arctic that would be the cold and in the UK it's actually quite hard because we're often dealing with cold rain and wind. We've had a bit of snow last night so it's really important that we make a good shelter to keep us warm. When we're looking at those things that we're protecting ourselves against we also need to look at what materials we have around us. In the Arctic we've got lots of snow so we can build an igloo or in the jungle we've got lots of big waxy leaves and there we're trying to protect ourselves against really heavy rain so we can make a shelter very quickly with those big leaves. Here if we're in the woods we could use sticks and dead leaves however our garden is pretty small so we're going to have to start thinking quite clever and come up with something a little bit improvised. I've got a really simple tarpaulin which is a waterproof sheet but you could use a shower curtain you could use some bed sheets if you can keep them clean or you can go to your local DIY store and buy a small builders tarpaulin and that will work just as well. The great thing about these is they're really small and light and you can use them in lots of different ways. In the attached document that we've sent to you you'll be able to see lots of ways of setting them up so you can decide which way works best in your garden. Before we look at putting one of these up it's really important to think about our own personal shelter and that's the clothes that we're wearing. If I came out this morning in shorts and a t-shirt I'd get cold and wet very quickly and in the wilderness that could be a big problem. The good thing about doing it in our back garden is if I get too cold and wet I can just go inside and warm up so it's a really good place to learn. I'm wearing one layer of my trousers because my legs stay quite warm most of the time and I'm wearing four layers on top. The key to staying warm is lots of layers. Lots of thin layers is better than one big heavy layer and where it's raining and snowing and a bit windy it's really important to put a waterproof layer over the top of that. If your clothes get wet you get cold very quickly so it's important lots of layers and to keep them dry. To top off your clothing it's really good to put a hat on. If I'm feeling cold I'll normally put gloves and a hat on and immediately start feeling much warmer. It's also really important that you don't get too hot so if I was to put on all these clothes and run off the mountain I'd soon sweat and then when I stopped I'd get very cold. So where you're working a lot it's important to take layers off. Okay so we're going to set up our shelter now and we're going to have a fire under it eventually so we want it to be nice and high we don't want our shelter to catch a light it wouldn't be a good way to spend the night. So I'm going to have it above my head and because we're in our back garden I have to be quite inventive where I look to tie it off to. So we've got this little lean two at the back of our house and if I take this cord and undo it I'm just looking for something I can tie it around that's nice and strong and this is this is really strong so even if it gets really windy it's not going to break. I've tied this up really neatly because when I take this out on wilderness trips I want it to come out my rucksack without being tangled up because it might be at the end of a really long day and it might be pouring with rain might be getting dark and if it's all tangled up then I have to spend half an hour untangling everything whereas if it's packed away neatly it comes up really quickly and I can put it up and they have a nice dry shelter in a few minutes. Now I've learned a few different knots that make tying these tarps up really quick. It doesn't really matter what knot you use as long as it holds when you put weight on it and there's a really good saying if you can't tie knots tie lots. So that's one end nice and secure and it doesn't matter if your lines aren't already attached to your tarpaulin or your shelter you just need to work out how far the distance is and make sure you've got that distance of rope or string plus a bit extra to tie the knots. So for the second knot I'm going to tie it off to our shed and I can just about get the string under the roof here it's a bit fiddly but that'll work I want this line to be nice and tight if it's really saggy it's not going to be a very good shelter so I want to get it as tight as possible so I've gone around the beam behind the gutter we don't want to attach it directly to the gutter because when we pull it tight the whole gutter might come off and that wouldn't be good and remember if you can't tie knots tie lots there we go that's nice and tight so now that our main line or ridge line is set up it's time to unfurl the tarp mine has loops that go through if yours haven't got that it doesn't matter you just need to set up the line and then drape your tarp over the top of it that looks good I'm just going to move it up here so I've got space for a fire it's nice to have this nice and tight so it doesn't flap around in the wind and the next thing is to tie out the corners and you can see that's going to create our roof which will keep us nice and dry I just have string on each corner and you can with your tarp all in use the eyelets and put string wherever you need to but normally the four corners is fine if I wanted to I could also put this right down on the ground and just use some pegs and put the tarp all in straight into the ground and make a little tent again it's important to try and find areas that you can tie the string to that are nice and secure and you're not going to cause any damage so that's one corner done I'm just going to tie this corner as well now the aim is to make these as tight as possible so that when it rains the rainwater hits the tarp and runs off if it's saggy it can form a big pool of water and water is really heavy and if that gets too heavy it can rip the tarp and if you're sleeping under it the worst thing is that that can burst in the middle of the night and it's like having a bucket of cold water thrown over you when you're in bed we're lucky because we've got an eyelet in here that we can tie off to but I could just go around this whole post or even if we're not using the gate we can go around the gate post this is a really useful knot I don't think you need to learn hundreds of knots but some of them are just really useful to know and this one is for making guidelines making them nice and tight I take the loose end and I go around three times so one two three and I'm just going around the one piece of string at the moment I then go around both of them and then I come back underneath and I take a loop through there I pull that tight the great thing about this knot is when I let go of it it holds in place and when I slide it and tighten it it holds in place again okay so this is the last corner that we need to tie out and it's nice if we get a steep angle on the roof if it's raining because then the rain's going to run off it if it's really flat then we're just going to create a swimming pool above our heads and I'm going to use exactly the same knot that I tied on the other three corners so you just really need three different types of knots to set something like this up and it doesn't matter if you haven't got the same type of tarpaulin or you haven't got the ability to tie it up nice and high the key with shelter building is to use what you've got to protect yourself against the elements that are most likely to make you uncomfortable so it's cold it's raining it's not very windy here so we don't need to worry about stopping the wind blowing under because we're surrounded by houses but we want to stop the rain landing on our heads and we've given ourselves a nice roof it's not going to keep us very warm in there so the next thing we're going to do is light a fire I like shelters that are nice and high because you can walk under them but if you wanted to you could drop it right down to the ground we can't peg it in because we haven't got any grass here but if you have a small lawn or a bit of grass in your garden or even in your local park then you can just get some pegs and peg the corners in and have as a small den that you can crawl into and that's really nice because you can make it really cozy but this has worked well for us I can use a log as a seat and in tomorrow's session we're going to show you fire lighting and for that we're going to make this shelter nice and warm by lighting a fire in here I'm really happy with that so here we've set up the tarp to show you another option a bit lower so I would normally set this up if the weather was really bad I'd have it much lower and you could even peg these edges straight out to the ground and make a small tent the only thing with this is you couldn't have a fire underneath it because this would catch fire I could also get some garden canes a broom or some hazel sticks like these are and I could just tie them together and make a frame so if I haven't got something to tie it to like this big post I could lash those together make a bipod it's got two legs so a bipod and then I can run the ridge line through the middle of that if I just show you here through the middle of that and then I can peg it into the ground and that will create a really stable structure as well it's all about improvising that's the key see what materials you've got and then just play around with it so if you haven't got a tarp all in like this this is just a really simple builder's tarp all in and because it's got eyelets on it we can tie it out in exactly the same way as this I'm going to use this one put underneath to make a floor so we don't get wet when we sit down it's a bit cold so I might get some blankets from inside put those down and then I won't get a cold bum so that's already a bit warmer and you can really make these places really really comfortable and there's nothing better than listening to the sound of the rain off the tarp all in and you're nice and dry and warm okay so this is what I've managed to create in our back garden and it's still raining a bit so it's really nice to get underneath it and feel dry and comfortable and I think it's always a good sign that you made a shelter that's comfortable when a dog is quite happy to fall asleep under it and oats here he looks like he's made himself at home so what we're going to do next session is light a fire and that will really make this place feel comfortable but we would love to see your creations so please upload on social media using the hashtag back garden bushcraft to be in with a chance of winning a goody bag and at the end of the week one family will win a whole family of backpacks good luck