Jon’s Bushcraft looks like somebody had a skill, took photographs while doing it, and put the instructions directly on the web. That sounds obvious. In 2026 it is almost exotic.
Jon Ridgeon’s tutorial index covers a ridiculous range of practical projects: willow baskets, bow-drill fire making, elder whistles, carved kuksa cups, birch-bark containers, natural cordage, fishing hooks, fish traps, berry pickers, wooden skis, canoes, combs, mortars, stoves, and more.
The articles are not optimized around a five-minute video or buried beneath a membership wall. They are generally sequences of photographs and explanatory text showing what material was used, what the next cut or bend should accomplish, and what went wrong when something did not behave.
That format ages well.
A personal site became a skills library
The gallery is especially good because it shows how the individual tutorials connect. Bark containers sit beside hand-carved utensils, ash longbows, lime-bark nets, steam-bent skis, snowshoes, fishing spears, a shave horse, and skin-on-frame canoes. You can see the same small set of tools and natural materials turning into very different objects.
Ridgeon’s older blog posts also preserve the personal side of the site. He wrote about moving from the UK to Norway, working toward a more self-sufficient life, publishing books on willow craft and basketry, and learning through repeated projects rather than presenting himself as an all-purpose wilderness authority.
One page about an ammo-can stove even includes the useful sentence modern instructional sites often avoid: this was his first stove, and he was not claiming the design was necessarily the best one.
That kind of caveat is worth keeping.
Why webmasters should notice it
A site like this is strong because the URL is not the product. The information is. A person searching years later for how to process lime bark for cordage or carve a wooden comb can land on one page, get the answer, and keep digging.
There is no requirement that a useful website constantly reinvent itself.
Jon’s Bushcraft is one of many sites in CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research list—independent pages where the value is mostly in somebody bothering to document what they know.
Browse the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
The site is still worth opening directly, especially the tutorial index. Pick something unnecessarily specific and disappear for a while.