The burned out ad man who found peace living in the woods
Ben’s high-flying job made him stressed and sad, so he built himself a hut and became a charcoal-maker
BEN Short loads another log on to his wood burner, sips a cup of tea and allows himself a deep sigh. “Seeing the embers glow, feeling the heat on your face, is all I need to feel at ease with the world,” he explains, stroking his beard and smiling with contentment. As the cost of living crisis bites across Britain, with utility bills going through the roof, the 51-year-old charcoal-maker is completely off grid in a hand-built hut deep in a Dorset wood amid the oak, hazel and beech trees that provide his living.
Ben – who quit a well-paid, high-profile job in advertising a decade ago to become a charcoalman – lives in the cabin for six months of the year. He doesn’t have mains electricity and, until a couple of months ago, had no water. Now a standpipe from a spring and a bucket serve his needs.
“Wood is the only thing I need to make charcoal and it’s all around me – life is all so beautifully simple,” he explains. “Woodsmoke settles me. I don’t need anything from the modern world to make a living.”
In his muddy boots and tweed cap, Ben looks born to country life but the reality is very different. Watching him enjoying the rhythm of his earthy existence, it’s hard to imagine he was once a highly-paid director for one of Britain’s most prestigious advertising companies.
Working for M&C Saatchi on a six-figure salary, he was responsible for TV campaigns for Harvest Crunch cereal bars, luxury cruise lines and Marks & Spencer – for whom he wrote a glittery Christmas advert in 2001, featuring George Best and Julian Clary among others.
But the stress of city life – and a form of anxiety-inducing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder – led him to leave the capital for the Dorset countryside.
Today, away from the noise, pollution and chaos, he has found the peace of mind he’s always craved while listening to the snap, crackle and pop of burning wood.
Incredibly, Ben is one of perhaps 100 Britons, mostly men, making a living by producing high-quality charcoal. This job involves days living in the woods and tending to the kilns that slowly bake logs into pieces of charcoal using ancient techniques.
“When you get it right the charcoal makes a tinkling sound like broken glass, which is just the most beautiful and natural sound you could hear,” he says.
WORKING outdoors in all weathers with his hands has become a form of therapy, as he reveals in his moving, lyrical memoir, Burn, which chronicles his transformation from adman to woodsman.
His father, Mick, worked as a police officer with the Flying Squad, chasing armed robbers, while his mother Frances was a sub-editor for Reader’s Digest.
After Ben and his twin brother Cameron came along, the family moved to a small farm near Winchester in Hampshire, where Mick grew wheat and raised geese and chickens on a few acres at the top of a hill.
“Dad was as hard as nails and still is super fit, an expert rower of Cornish gig boats,” says Ben. “He rowed across the Atlantic when he was 69. Mum was always more of a home bird.”
Every day Ben and his brother climbed trees, and explored the country around them while excelling at school. Ben spent happy years at Kingston Polytechnic in south London studying English, then four years playing rugby for Harlequins.
While in his 20s he changed career and joined a top flight advertising agency in London as an art director and writer.
It was creative work and very well paid, but Ben found juggling the demands of various clients stressful.
“It sounds like the ideal job and I loved it at first because there was so much creativity in advertising but over time I found the work was getting me down,” he confides. “I travelled all over the world, from Sydney to
Buenos Aires, but the lack of imagination in the profession was killing me inside.
“There was always this pressure to crack the brief – I felt as though I was in a prison cell with gold bars.”
Crippling feelings of anxiety and depression made it difficult for him to cope with the daily grind of work. He sought therapy and was told he was suffering from Pure OCD.
People with OCD are often obsessively neat and do repetitive actions, like constantly
making sure cushions are neatly aligned on a sofa. However, those with Pure OCD are tormented by disturbing and potentially lifethreatening thoughts.
“After seven years in advertising my head was pulp, I was very ill and life looked very bleak, so I had to do something. I was in a very bad place,” he reflects.
Against the advice of his therapist, he quit his job at the age 36 and moved in with a
girlfriend in Cambridge while trying to get his life back on track. He worked briefly as a gardener in a project to help those suffering mental health problems but the big breakthrough came when he was 38 and started working as an apprentice woodsman.
“It was an epiphany moment which took me back to when I was eight and I saw some charcoal being made in a kiln in a wood in Hampshire and suddenly I was in that magical moment again,” Ben recalls. “I understood then that working with wood made me happy.
“Some people may think it’s a strange occupational choice, but for me it was obvious. After so many years I had at last discovered what I wanted to do.
“I had been trapped in the neverending loops in my own head, the neverending thoughts, but now I was free to do something I enjoyed with an end result, with a way of making a good living.”
Now he rents a few acres of wooded countryside near Bridport, Dorset, where, when he is not in the woods making charcoal, he lives in a conventional home with his partner Holly Hughes, a reiki healer.
Their two-year-old son is called Silas, an old country name that means “man from the woods”. “I had to build this structure from wood, which includes the cabin office and storage, which was hard work but I relished the challenge of that,” he says.
“I slept out here in an old wooden caravan for many months to get the work done, but I was never bored or lonely and I think that was because I had a positive purpose – to get the business up and running. I’m getting a lot busier now and I’ve just started getting my three kilns going.This is the part of the year I enjoy the most, making charcoal.”
The kilns are six-feet wide steel rings. At the base bits of broken wood are used for the fire. Chunks of oak or hazel are piled up and lids with chimneys are put on the kilns.There are three inlets on each kiln to let a limited amount of oxygen in to allow chunks of wood to burn without catching fire.
A single kiln can transform a tonne of wood into 180kg of charcoal in a couple of days but you have to get it exactly right.
“All the water is driven out and the tars are drawn out,” Ben explains. “You don’t want it burning away to ash, but burned enough to turn the wood into charcoal. In the summer I sleep by the kilns so I can keep an eye on them to make sure everything is okay. I’ve been doing it for several years now
so I know how long it takes and when to stop the fire.
“It can take 12 hours if the wood is already dry but more than 20 hours if it is wet.There is a sort of steam vapour coming from the chimneys when the moisture comes out. When that has a blue tinge you know the charcoal is ready.”
Once the charcoal is cooled it is bagged up and sold locally, usually for barbecues. British charcoal from sustainable woodland is fashionable among high-end chefs and serious barbecuers.
“There are no chemicals in this process, so there’s no odd smells and it’s much better for cooking sausages or whatever than the charcoal that is imported,” he says.
When demand is strong, he can make £200 a day, a healthy living for a woodsman.While the kilns are burning, he spends the long summer days sawing or chopping wood he’s gathered or building hedges the old fashioned way.
HIS weapon of choice in the advertising world was an N50 tip marker pen, but now it’s a hedging axe. He has time to savour nature’s distractions: a barn owl cruising at dusk, a fox lying in wait in a hedgerow or a circling hawk in the sky above. He describes working alongside nature as a spiritual reboot he needed to save his sanity.
Many would envy his lifestyle in the warm sunshine, but Ben also enjoys working outdoors in the winter – nearly all his wood is produced from natural wastage from his coppicing work, thinning his woodland. “These practices are always done in winter when the trees and plants are dormant. In this way my seasons dovetail.”
And delving into his family’s past he has discovered a spooky fact. Centuries ago his great-great-grandfather was a farmhand and hedgelayer in the same area of Dorset.
“I was really quite shocked when I found that out but actually when you think about it, it makes sense.
“Working the woods and fields is in my blood,” he says, reaching over for another log to chuck on the burner.
●●Burn: A Story Of Fire, Woods And Healing by Ben Short (Sceptre, £16.99) is out now. For free UK delivery on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.com