 In English, kettle comes from the Saxon Cattel, a rare, lone word into Germanic languages from the Latin Cattalus, a deep pan for cooking. Why think about the origin of this word? Metal containers for boiling water are ancient, but what do you think ancient Greek or Roman people used to heat their pans? Electricity? Kerosene? Compressed natural gas? Heating water is foundational to human society, a technology that defines us. How do we maintain that skill in an increasingly uncertain world? In the late 1980s, I went camping for a couple of days. In unexpectedly frosty weather, my camping gas stove refused to work. Unfazed, I made a stick fire, and heated my saucepan over the fire propped on some rocks. That got me thinking, this is really easy, so why don't I do this more often? That thought over 30 years ago inexperably leads here. The practice of camping today, even the allegedly frugal wild camping, has become suffused with the rationality of consumerism and the need to reduce any obstacle to an invocation to buy stuff. That inevitably means the use of fossil fuels as a heat source for heating water. Before you say, but I use bioethanol, that's an industrial product too. Made from an intensively produced crop feedstock which supplies, including the energy to make the container and transport it, much less energy than it takes to manufacture. That excess of energy used in production and supply is primarily sourced from fossil fuels. The alternative, using a traditional stick fire, that familiar humans have used to heat cauldrons and kettles, is becoming difficult to use. It takes some technical skill to use a campfire in all weathers. More importantly, the English government is trying to make the use of fires outdoors of forbidden activity. The recent revision of the countryside code made the situation even more confusing. It states, do not light fires and only have barbecues where the signs say you can. Be careful with naked flames and cigarettes. Only use barbecues where signs state they are allowed. Always put your barbeque out. Make sure the ashes are cold and dispose of them responsibly. So, open fires, bad. A fire made of manufactured industrial charcoal, a single-use, non-badegradable four container that inevitably litters many beauty spots. Good. Like the Whitehall government generally, the absurdity of the English countryside code is a logical embarrassment, certainly compared to that of the Scottish outdoor access code. Wherever possible, use a stove rather than light an open fire. If you do wish to light an open fire, keep it small, under control, and supervised. How do we heat water outdoors, without using fossil fuels directly, in the form of butane or petrol or manufactured fuels, or indirectly with bar fuels, and get around these absurd government restrictions? The restrictions on using campfires outdoors in England and Wales require a fire to be lit inside something. There are many types of folding firebox stove, but they tend to spit fire everywhere, meaning their efficiency is rather low and so they use a lot of fuel. What is required is an enclosed fireproof container. Sorry to butt in with a quick advert, but if you'd like to see more content like this, then you really should consider liking this video, subscribing to my YouTube channel, perhaps leaving a comment below, and following me on social media. In today's digital analytics popularity contest, all that button pressing means something in this messed up world, and if we're going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it. Following my early use of stick fires, I made various improvised hobo stoves to cook them. Then in the mid-2000s, I happened across a kelly kettle. I borrowed one for a weekend, and literally the next week I bought my own. Then a year or so later, when I saw they made a smaller, more compact model, I bought one of those too, well over 14 years later, and they're still in use. A kelly kettle is a purpose-made water boiler in two halves. The base is a thick metal fire pit with one or two air holes in one side. The top half is a metal water jacket, where the heat and smoke rise up a cone-shaped chimney, which draws air through the fire and provides a large surface area to heat the water quickly. The kelly kettle doesn't use wood. Wood takes too long to burn properly. The kelly kettle uses dry stems and sticks, the most plentiful source of fuel you can pick up outdoors. Certainly, there's no need to attack a tree with a saw or spend time splitting wood to make the thick branches burn more easily. Using the kettle is very simple. Before stopping, spend a minute collecting a handful of sticks. Boiling the kettle takes a handful. Cooking for longer requires a handful of long sticks. Sticks from the surface of the path, not stuck into the soil, or from the base of a hedge, are usually dry enough to use. Find a clear spot on the ground, preferably on bare soil or rock. The kettle will produce a scorch mark if used on grass. Likewise, standard rules for all outdoor fire supply. The fire may spit out the odd hot coal, so don't use on leafy woodland floors, dry grass, or peat, as you might set fire to the ground. Break up the sticks into short sections, four or five centimetres or two inches long. Collecting enough ready-to-use fuel first says panic into feed short sticks into the fire later. Put tinder or paper in the base to start the fire. In winter, I carry a small bag of dry tinder in my pack for this. Put dry grass or very thin dry sticks on top of the tinder, then lay smaller sticks on top until the base is full. Fill the kettle with water. Seriously, it's easy to forget before you light the fire, and the fire burns so quickly that you can lose a lot of it while messing around to find your water bottle and fill the kettle. Light the fire in the base and put the kettle on top, or light the tinder through the hole in the base through the top on. Use whatever approach you find easier. The kettle's shape means that once lit, the fire draws quickly. Once the fire is going well, flames will emerge from the top of the kettle. Small sticks burn quickly, so the fire will need to be fed. As the flames from the chimney start to die down, just drop some of the remaining sticks prepared earlier down the top of the chimney. Before the kettle boils, steam will drift from the spout. When it is boiling, steam will jet from the spout, and if the kettle is very full, boiling water will spit out too, so be careful not to get scolded. Pour the boiling water directly into a cup or bowl. If you want to carry on and cook on the base, then do the following. Take the boiling kettle off the base using the handle and stand on the ground. Put the metal grill over the base. If there is not a lot of fuel left, add thin sticks before putting the grill on top. Pour the boiling water into a pan and stand it on the grill. This will make it hard to put more sticks into the fire from the top, so smaller sticks will need to be fed into the fire through the air holes in the base. Then cook away. When finished, leave the fire to burn itself out, which will usually take an hour. Otherwise, pour water into the base to extinguish the fire and cool the base. Or pick up the base with tongs and tip out onto the bare earth. Then pour water over the coals. The latter tends to be easier as the ash doesn't cake onto the inside of the base, later falling off and filling your bag. Fin sticks burn to ash, larger sticks burn to charcoal. You can collect the charcoal to start over fires. If not, bury or scatter the cold wet charcoal to avoid visible litter. I usually dig a shallow hole and bury it to hide the charcoal safely from view. Burying the charcoal adds biochar to the soil and thus takes carbon out the atmosphere. That makes your camp stove carbon negative. Theoretically, as activated carbon, you could also use the charcoal from their kettle crushed for filtering water, which will also help to remove some of the nitrates and other agricultural chemicals found in lowland springs and streams. The top part of the kettle cools quickly. If you make sure it is completely empty when still hot, any moisture will evaporate and leave it completely dry, ready to pack away without fitting the cork, which makes the inside smell mustier for left for a while. The base, unless cooled with water, might take 15 minutes or more to cool once the coals are tipped out of it. The base gets very hot when in use so don't touch it. Use tongs and a camping saucepan to tip it up. Once cooled, the kettle can be packed away in your bag. Most kettle kits come with a carry bag, which is very good, but it was still shed ash and soot from the inside. For that reason, I always wrap mine in a plastic bag. Finally, putting the kettle back in your pack makes everything inside take on the lovely odour of wood smoke. That's why I strap my kettle to the outside of my pack. There is more than one supplier of Kelly kettle like stoves in Britain. The Kelly kettle company sell various sizes in either steel or aluminium. They also sell kettle kits that contain a saucepan, metal grill to fit the base, and a well-fitting carry bag. Kits cost £70 to £120. The kettle alone costs £50 to £60. Other suppliers, such as the Eden kettle company, supply a slightly different style of kettle, but the prices are comparable. Of course, the great saving, both in the cost and ecological impact, is the need not to buy fuel. For a few years now, I haven't carried a gas or petrol-based stove in backpacking. The small aluminium trekker model weighs half a kilo, not dissimilar to a gas or primary stove in a bottle of fuel. As a durable item, using carbon-neutral fuel, carbon negative if the charcoal is buried, a Kelly kettle represents the future of camping outdoors. In comparison, fuels like bio-Ephanel, just greenwash, fossil fuel use. We have to normalise people using campfires. If people act stupidly with fires, it's because the government, in trying to eradicate the use of campfires, are killing off the skills to use campfires sensibly. We have to build a critical mass of people using stickfires when camping, not just for the usual tired reasons about the climate, but also to encourage greater resilience and self-sufficiency. That not only means people will look after the countryside. More importantly, they will see practical ways to move beyond the failing economic project of consumerism in other aspects of their lifestyle too.