Natural Tinder that will take a low grade spark.

These fungi are often refered to as Cramp Balls, or King Alfreds Cakes. The former due to the fact that if you ingest them they are deemed to bring on stomach cramps and make you vomit (for obvious reasons we do not recomend this!), and for the latter as they resemble the cakes that King Alfred was said to have burnt when tasked with keeping an eye on them but then becoming slightly distracted by the fact he was in hiding! Anyway, we digress, for our purposes these fungi, Daldinea concentrica, make a good natural tinder. They will readily take a spark which is then turned into an ember. This ember can be used in your initial stages of building your fire.

So what do our instructors think? Here Jason writes:

"There is nothing more satisfying that lighting your fire using just natural materials, and this is probably my second favourite natural material (email me to find out my favourite!). With a little encouragement it will take a spark from a flint and steel, but with no effort at all it will take one from your fire steel. I find it easier to dry the material out once harvested for 24 hours, feather up a little dust using the tip of your knife and then introduce a spark on to it. Once an ember appears to be taking hold gently blow on the ember to encourage further heat. We grow and harvest these sustainably in our woodland in Oxfordshire and decided to sell them as some customers did not have ready access to supplies. If you would prefer to harvest them yourself then they grow predominatly on dead ASH (Fraxinus excelsior), although I have seen them on Beech before aswell. Take the fruiting body when it is dark black and when broken open it should reveal concentric circles with alternate light/dark patches. The fruiting body is not ready for fire lighting if they are still a reddish/brown. I have heard of people boiling water just using these... although if they are attached to a big dead piece of Ash I would probably use this instead to boil my water on!"

Advantages: They will take even a low grade spark from your flint and steel, but easliy take a spark from a fire steel. 

Disadvantages: They do have a tendency to break up when put in your rucksack or pocket. We combat this by carrying them in a leather pouch, which enables them to breath but we continue to hold any dust that breaks off to make the most efficient use of the material... avoid plastic containers, they will make your tinder sweat and mould easily!

Please note these are naturally occuring fungi and so will all grow to different sizes. In your pack of four we will do our utmost to ensure you get four medium sized bodies, if we feel that the bodies are small then we will increase the number of fungi in your pack to 5 or 6 accordingly at our discretion.