Earth stove

It's that time of year when my mind turns to bushcraft skills, in particular fire making and outdoor cooking.  To that end I decided to brew up whilst out today; and my lesson today was to be humility and the dangers of complacency and over confidence. As we walked I collected dry ferns, the outer papery bark of the Birch and thin dry twigs, this was going to be the basis of my tinder and kindling. At a suitable point (a spot by Red Rise Brook where I've traditionally practiced fire making) we stopped and I set about preparing. I'd decided to have a go a building a rocket style cooker directly into an earthen bank and so dug an L shaped hole; the horizontal hole was to be for fueling the fire and the vertical hole as a flue on top of which I'd place a metal peg as a cup/pan support.  Simple I thought. The structure completed I used a piece of bark on which to build my fire and to transport it to the fueling/fire hole. It didn't take me long to get a fire started and I was feeling rather pleased with myself, though my cockiness was a bit previous as keeping the fire going was a more difficult operation than I'd anticipated.  The problem I discovered was that the horizontal hole wasn't big enough to hold the fuel without almost being blocked and the vertical hole was, even with the cup support, almost smothered by the cup and consequently the fire was being starved of air flow. I had to remove the fire, make some adjustments and start again, and even then I had to keep blowing through to ensure the fires survival. All that said I did have a hot drink at the end of it and had had a healthy reminder of the dangers of over confidence.