Lighting a Fire without a match

Matches – Lucifers – were invented in 1826. They took on quickly, for surely they are practical and useful, but there is a beauty in lighting a fire without them that is hard to resist.

Tinder: dry grass, seed heads, lichen, dead leaves and char cloth

Firelighting, using whatever nature gives you, is an instinct, and the ingredients to start a fire are elemental and beautiful.

Sadly, lighting a fire without a match requires a bit of planning. Rubbing two sticks together may work some places in the world, but if you're starting a fire in temperate Northern Europe, chances are you are hungry, and if you want to get that pot boiling soon enough, then what you need is your own Tinder Box. (Naturally, if you forget your tinder box, it's just as bad as having soggy matches, or a lighter that has run out of fuel).

When making a fire you need to consider three elements: tinder, to get it started, kindling to get it going, and fuel to burn. For our purposes here we are only thinking about the tinder stage, the things you need to get a flame from a spark.

Tinder is best picked on a dry day. Collect it from the trees – anything on the ground or the beach just won't be dry enough. Good materials for tinder are lichen, seed heads, tiny twigs or cut grass that has been left to dry. A bit of paper helps as well, though this might count as cheating.

If you really want to make a fire in the ancient way, use char cloth. Char cloth is cotton that has been combusted in the absence of oxygen. It's fun to make - just cut up an old T-shirt, or a cotton bag. Use a tin with a small hole in the top (the hole will stop the tin from exploding). Put the tin over a flame, and leave on the heat until the smoke no longer rises from the little hole. When you open it up you will have black pieces of cloth, which when they catch a spark, will not burn, but rather smoulder like a firelighter, giving the grass and other tinder a chance to ignite.


So finally, to your spark. What you need is a piece of flint and a piece of steel (you can buy them in army surplus and adventure stores). The way these work is, the ultra hard flint scrapes off tiny pieces of hot metal from the steel. You need to catch these minute metal fireballs - and this is where the char cloth comes in. Another way to catch them is with a piece of cotton wool. Then, add your tinder, and when this ignites, you move on to the next stage, the kindling, for which you simply use larger twigs.