Second weekend in a row of uniformed adults having adventures in the woods! But this time, we’re not pretending to be Scouts and the neckerchiefs aren’t a festival costume; we’re the real thing – Girlguiding adult volunteers and the neckerchiefs were mostly Region ones.
Try Inspire Qualify is an adults-only event run by Girlguiding South West England (aka “Region”), held every two years (give or take the plague years) and it’s far and away my favourite Girlguiding event. It’s a weekend away where you get to try things (adventurous activities), get inspired (attend workshops) and get qualified (optional; costs extra). In 2016, I got my archery qualification, in 2018 I got my fencing qualification, in 2022 I made a friend and skipped the qualifications in favour of just having a fun weekend and in 2024, I missed it because my Brownie pack decided to do a day out that weekend. So when I saw the 2026 edition on sale the first week of January, I applied immediately and if the Brownies had any plans for the first weekend in September, they’re doing them without me! Someone said that a friend or leader in their division had decided not to come this year because there was no qualification she wanted to but the qualifications are a bonus! It’s just as fun – maybe even more fun – to just come and do the activities!
This year, because I’d been at Camp Wildfire the weekend before, it felt a bit like part 2 of adult adventure camp, albeit a camp where you get to sleep inside. I didn’t know exactly what activities I’d be assigned but we’d be given lists and asked to number them by how much we wanted to do them, so I was pretty sure I was getting canoeing and raft building (you do get a heads up on water activities because you need to bring extra stuff), advanced whittling and campfire singing. Not 100% sure but from where I’d put them on my list and from my guesses at their popularity, reasonably sure.
It was held at Foxlease Park, which is one of the Training and Activity Centres Girlguiding unilaterally sold off in 2023 without ever mentioning that they were having trouble. Foxlease was bought by a CIO called Foxie’s Future and actually reopened in early 2025 and it’s incredible that it’s been the best part of 18 months since then and I’ve never been back. The big house is still closed and some of the campsites are covered over with tape on the direction signs but by and large, it’s up and running pretty much as it was before. I don’t know how many of us there were at Try Inspire Qualify but we occupied rooms in the Barn, which was our centre of operations, the Coach House and the Lodge, previously known as Princess Margaret Lodge, so pretty much all the available indoor space, if the Barn & Coach House were as full as the Lodge.
Friday
We all drifted in over Friday afternoon and evening, had supper of chickpea curry in the Barn and then the evening was our own. There was a campfire in the renovated campfire circle, except that because we’re in the New Forest, barely five miles from the major incident whereby nearly 250 acres of the New Forest was on fire up until just over a week before Try Inspire Qualify, there was no campfire. No marshmallows, no golden flickering light, just ten or fifteen leaders sitting in the dark singing together. It was nice. There were three leaders from Keynsham who largely took charge (which they apologised for and everyone else loved) and I led a song or two. I like singing with the girls but I have to say that singing with just adults was a very different, and very pleasant experience. All voices were beautiful and there wasn’t a millisecond’s delay in repeat-after-me songs – the smoothest Crazy Moose I’ve ever led! I acquired an extra verse in A Pizza Hut and added the Baby Duck song to my repertoire.
Saturday
We all had different activities but for me, Saturday started with bushcraft. This is one that comes under the heading of “workshop” rather than “adventurous activity” but it’s not necessarily that easy to differentiate between them. Bushcraft involved learning about water filtration – and, to be honest, realising that in an emergency, I’m simply not going to have this stuff handy. Then we built some shelters with a tarp, a few scraps of rope and nowhere near enough tent pegs. We went over the clove hitch, round turn and two half hitches, trucker’s hitch and fisherman’s knot – traditional Guiding skills but ones that a lot of adults didn’t know. Then we went round and critiqued each other’s shelters. Finally, we talked about methods of lighting fires. Maybe last year we could have tried them out but this year.. New Forest, major incident, government warning… we talked without doing.
Second was advanced whittling, just as I predicted. It’s not necessarily advanced but Vicky from Devon comes to this event every year and some people have got beyond “this is a knife, this is how not to cause major damage, this is the legal bit, now make an elf” so she had some wood and some projects and we basically picked whatever we fancied to have a go at without needing our hands held quite as much as last time. There was a stick where you just show off all your whittling skills, there was a kazoo, a pencil (you could carve a mushroom or an elf on the other end if you really wanted), a wrapped stick, a butter knife or a kayak knife. I did the butter knife by the end of the session, Vicky had agreed that if Teresa, in charge of the whole thing, would allow it, she’d bring all the equipment into the Barn this evening and we could carry on. I was done with the butter knife, which is fairly simple – take a hazel stick, whittle the top of one end flat, turn it over and repeat, carve a kind of ring to separate blade from handle, round one side of the blade and then thin out one side until you can spread butter with it! It’s a thing of beauty and I even rounded the end of the handle. To be honest, I could have carried on finessing the blade until I turned it into a toothpick, which is mostly why I went for the handle. I’m bad at knowing when to stop. I carried that knife around for the rest of the day, showing it off to anyone who came near me – look, I whittled a knife! This afternoon, I swiped the blade over a couple of times with a sheet of coarse sandpaper and it’s incredible how smooth and shiny it feels now.
After lunch came knotty crafts which turned out to be a macrame owl. I’m not huge on macrame and the instructions were bewildering so most of us needed quite a bit of attention. My finished owl is ok. Its legs are wonky and one of its eyes has pulled over to the wrong side but I did just about manage to finish it before I had to rush off to get changed for raft building. Maybe not my favourite activity of the weekend but at least, with help, I completed it.
Foxlease rafting works a little differently to boathouse rafting because we have different materials. Foxlease has about twenty chunks of wood that resemble masts, great chunky lengths of wood about as thick as my leg and ten or fifteen feet long. You lay four out in a square and put a second down the two sides, which is where your barrels will sit. Then you lash the frames together – eight joints altogether, so one for instructor Mark to show us and seven for the seven of us to do! Then you lift it up and slot four barrels in, two each side. They get tied fairly simply with what I now know is a trucker’s hitch, two ropes around each barrel, so again, one demo and one each. Then you carry it down to the water and slide it in and some poor fool has to climb on and slither to the front without tipping the whole thing over. Yes, me. And while we were carrying and sliding, the ropes around the front two barrels almost came off, so we had to slither down and re-secure them.
Once we were aboard, it was all surprisingly stable, even with seven adults aboard. Slow moving – Mark and Heather were in the water in a canoe and even with them barely bothering to paddle, they were light years ahead of us. We paddled it in circles, we paddled it backwards, we went down to the far end of the lake and back. Some of the braver or more agile among us stood up and one even climbed across the front to our side and then back.
Then we had an hour’s free time before dinner, which I used to get back into dry clothes and go for a walk around Foxlease, which was mostly for my daily walk requirement (in 2020, I imposed a daily 2km walk on myself which I’m keeping up still) but partly out of curiosity to see what’s changed. Materially, not a lot, except the tape over the signs, renaming the Lodge, some of the campsites crossed off etc. The huts on the campsites have apparently been updated with better facilities, better hot water and it looks like gaps over doors have been patched up. Hard to tell very much from the outside of them when we’re all sleeping in the buildings and not camping, though. I met three deer up in the top corner who had no idea how to get away from me except by pronking down the path I was walking down, which meant to them it appeared I was constantly chasing them.
We had a roast dinner on Saturday night but because there’d been an issue with the food delivery that required an emergency shopping trip in the morning, the pudding was still frozen, so instead of “the evening is yours!” again, we had “we will now wash up, there will be a wide game and then we’ll have pudding and then we’ll talk about the evening”. I had my heart set on whittling so while everyone else played the wide game, I went outside with my knives, found a spot where I could see and hear everything but I wasn’t going to accidentally slash anyone’s legs and started smoothing out the scoop part of my kayak spoon.
We’d planned another campfire, where those of us who’d been there Friday night would tell everyone that there was a campfire after the wide game and we’d come with song ideas, so I was torn between singing and whittling but having got some vague instructions for the spoon, it turned out there was no one at the campfire circle. Best of both worlds. I get to make a spoon but I don’t have to miss the singing.
A kayak spoon is a spoon that… looks a bit like a kayak. You take half a stick, quite a substantial stick – mine is an inch and a half wide – and scoop out one end of the rounded side until you have a place to carve the bowl. Then you round that end around what will be the shape of the bowl. Bring the bottom up until it’s a suitable spoon depth and then you take most of the bottom of the other end off, leaving the bark on top. Round off the bottom and then sit with your spoon knife and dig the bowl out. Tidy it all up, leave it a few days before sanding (if you’re a good enough whittler, it won’t need sanding but I’m not and mine did) and you’ve got a weird-looking spoon! They’re easier than a conventional spoon for beginners; you don’t have to worry about accidentally hacking or snapping the bowl off or making the neck too thin but they’re difficult in that you need to look at it and think about it in a way you’ve never done before. I put another half hour or so into it when I got home on Sunday but it was about 90% done by bedtime.
Sunday
We had to be out of our rooms by 11am, so with breakfast at 8 and activities starting at 9, that mostly meant being packed up and out before breakfast. I’d hauled a jacket and my big camp blanket out for the campfire on Saturday night, so when I locked the knives back in the car, I chucked them in too. I wasn’t going to need them again in the next 10 hours so might as well save myself an extra journey. It only took one hike down to the car park with my luggage before breakfast and a second with my bedding roll (much smaller than usual with only one blanket in it) and then I was done in time to sit on the wall outside the Barn and admire my wooden cutlery before going in for breakfast, which started early since everything was out and we were already there.
First activity on Sunday was canoeing. I didn’t go full wetsuit this time; I wore my long-sleeved swimsuit under my boathouse t-shirt (a local leader from the boathouse division recognised the badge) and I zipped the legs off my activity trousers and put on my water shoes. My roommate did canoeing on Saturday and they capsized, having leaned out too far to catch a ball. I’d blithely said “Oh, you didn’t overload it, those things can take tons!” and I’d wondered just how hard they’d had to lean to capsize but once I was in, I realised exactly how hard. I occasionally hire a canoe on a sunny Sunday morning and paddle it solo up the river and it feels like a bathtub. These ones felt very unstable. The seats are higher up, for a start, but they just felt lower and narrower and you want to wobble it just to see how far it’ll wobble without tipping but you can’t test it properly without… well, tipping it over. It’s more stable in movement – rafting up was terrifying but racing to the end and back was great fun. I stand by the assertion that canoes can take plenty of weight without sinking but they felt really wobbly and sat far too high in the water and I don’t like them.
My last proper activity was pyrography, wood burning with a superheated pen/soldering iron. I put my name on a tag using stencils, which is something I’ve never done with a pyrography pen and also spectacularly unimaginative but it might be fun to tie it onto my luggage for my next couple of Guiding adventures, or onto my whittling bag. Then I scrolled for ideas and eventually put a campsite on a spoon. I’m really bad at “now it’s time to stop” so I tried out some stars on the practice wood and then put them all the way up the handle. I’ve done quite a lot of pyrography in my time – I have a set of those little plywood Ikea mini drawer units and I did every single drawer with my pyrography pen – but I’m especially pleased with this spoon.
After lunch, we were supposed to have a talk from one of the Region ambassadors, Mandy Hickson, one of the first female fast jet pilots, but she had a bike accident in France earlier in the summer and after two and a half weeks in a French hospital, she was finally due to be repatriated on the Sunday, so not really ready to come and give a motivational talk to Guide leaders on a camp in the New Forest! So we had some hastily-added drop-in activities – paracord crafts or mini pioneering. I had a go at a monkey’s fist knot, which is the really neat three-strand ball that you often see as keyrings. I figured out how to tie it ok but it took at least four tries for me to able to tighten the strands correctly. In theory it’s easy – you just start at the beginning and work round but I’d find myself suddenly loosening the first strand instead of tightening the ones that go round the middle and have to physically fend off the urge to throw in on the ground in a tantrum. I finished it but it was very wonky and everything overlapped and it wasn’t pretty and I inevitably sat down over the last week and re-did it. This time I accepted that if I ended up pulling everything the wrong way, it didn’t matter as long as the ball itself was reasonably tight – I could cut the paracord at both ends instead of hoping to get it perfectly tied at the right end.
And that was it. Once you were done, you just left. No ceremony. The archery qualification wasn’t due to finish until 5 – ah, well do I remember it ten years ago, spending two or three hours on Friday evening on archery theory while everyone else was getting settled in and eating, and still being there after the site had fallen silent. But I got my archery qualification and I’ve been teaching it ever since! I don’t know what other qualifications were happening on Sunday – food safety was Saturday, Paddlepower must have been done by about 3 because I saw Mark and Heather packing up and I don’t know if they ended up doing the fencing qualification.
It was a good weekend. The fact that I wasn’t in a tent in the pouring rain was already a win over Camp Wildfire and I did spend a while reflecting on the people at Camp Wildfire vs the people at Try Inspire Qualify. See, I’d looked at badly-pitched tents collapsing in the rain and wind and thought “Baden-Powell would be turning in his grave at people with these skills pretending to be Scouts” but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d appreciate that they were learning new skills and trying new things and that they could see the good in his Scouting ideas. That people who wouldn’t normally camp were spending a weekend outdoors having adventures and challenging themselves. He’d love that. And yes, they’re playacting at being Scouts when the majority of them would never dream of giving up their time to share those skills and adventures with young members but the germ of the idea is in there and maybe one day they’ll think to act on it.
And then we had the crowd at TIQ, who are the real thing, except in Guiding instead of Scouting. We, every last one of us, are involved in Girlguiding in some way, the majority of us as unit leaders and many of us with other roles in the organisation (I’m an adventure leader, so I’m already sharing all this with the kids, and I’m a leadership mentor, so I’m helping create more leaders) and we’re all here this weekend, not out of duty, but because we wanted to spend a weekend at an event where we’d meet other people and try new things and have fun. Vicky from the whittling said that maybe we’d take some of these things back to our units but it’s ok if we’re just here for ourselves and there should be more opportunities for leaders that are just for them and not for the kids. I’m logging this year on Instagram because it’s my 20th year as a leader and I’m already realising, a week in, that I’m maybe doing far too much but with this, with what I’m doing in two weeks (come back on the 28th for that…) and Trefoil, I’m clawing back a certain amount for me just in September. And I spent the entire weekend recognising faces – some from County, some from previous events and three are members of the Rebel Badge Club – turns out the one I stared at all Friday night and Saturday morning is not just someone I’ve seen at Rebel events; she was in my Patrol at the last meet up, so we’ve already spent an entire day doing activities together!
And maybe, by the time this post goes live, I might have dried and sanded and otherwise finished my kayak knife. Enjoy this picture of it, if it’s here by then. If it’s not, it might be here if you come back later.