Woods man branches out to jungle home

By Eleanor Williams
BBC News, Oxfordshire

Dogs out on walks sometimes find their way to Mr Sawyer's campsite

For more than a year, he has lived in a sleeping bag in an Oxfordshire wood.

At first, Hugh Sawyer, 33, thought of it as a way of raising money for charity and drawing attention to the threat posed to British woodland.

But instead of giving up his uncomfortable lifestyle after achieving his goals, Mr Sawyer is planning a new challenge - to live in the Amazon jungle for a year.

I woke up on Christmas Day morning and had to pick slugs off my presents Hugh Sawyer

His campsite is neat and tidy, something he says he is necessary in order to survive in the woods.

He spends nights in a sleeping bag underneath a tarpaulin cover, picks berries and mushrooms for food, and cooks and bakes bread over an open fire.

He has tried to make his living as authentic as possible.

"At first I was relying on a petrol stove, then a gas stove but then slowly moved on to lighting fires," he said.

He has even built an earth oven underneath his camp fire where he cooks meat between two metal discs - which also serve as weights in his makeshift gym.

He uses his gym weights when cooking meat in his earth oven

It is a clear and crisp November day and Mr Sawyer is about to prepare dinner for a couple of friends he has invited over for the evening.

"I'll have to cook before it gets dark or I won't see what I'm doing. I'm making a vegetable stew and some bread," he said.

He has a law degree from Oxford but feels a career in the legal field is not for him. "I found it really boring," he explained.

"I used to play in the woods a lot as a child. [To live there] was something I always promised myself I would do when I was old enough."

For a year after re-locating, Mr Sawyer kept his city job as a bidding clerk at Sotheby's auction houses in London.

The Oxford law graduate said he enjoys living so close to nature

He would spend four hours a day commuting by bus from his campsite near the village of Lewknor to London, where arrived at work, had a shower and changed into his suit.

Through his unusual lifestyle he managed to raise more than £6,000 for the Woodland Trust.

But combining a nine-to-five job with living in a ditch underneath a tree in rural Oxfordshire eventually proved too much. So Mr Sawyer gave up the day job, but stayed living in the wood.

He said: "Some days I've woken up in the middle of the night freezing cold and covered in ice. The coldest it's been is minus 9C.

Mr Sawyer said he used to be better at lighting fires as a child

"All I could do was light really big fires, but I ended up melting bits of my sleeping bag so I decided against it."

Last Christmas - when many of us were waking up in comfortable beds to the smell of roast turkey - a frozen Mr Sawyer emerged from his sleeping bag in the woods.

"I woke up on Christmas Day morning and had to pick slugs off my presents, he said.

"But I had a nice meal, I had roast venison, which I cooked in my earth oven."

In the spring, he will swap his Thames Valley jungle for Ecuador. He will spend a year camping on six different altitudes, from beach level to the snow-capped Andes to raise funds for Rainforest Concern.

The campsite's only neighbours are an owl, deer and badgers

He also plans to run a travel guide website using solar powered energy from his jungle-base.

He said: "I think it'll be very hot and sticky and incredibly challenging at times, but the main problem will probably be boredom.

"It's one of those things that will be good to have done," he said with a smile on his face.

But he insists he is not planning to stop living in the woods when he gets back.

"I'll probably try the same thing in North America or possibly in Sweden."