About

Somewhere in the Forest of Dean, there’s a man who knows which oak trees the best mushrooms grow near, and he learned it from his father, who learned it from his. He doesn’t write it down. He’s never Googled it. When he’s gone, that knowledge goes with him — unless something changes.

That’s the gap Folktech is trying to sit in.

This blog exists at the intersection of folk tradition and modern technology, written from the Forest of Dean and South Wales borderlands — a region where Welsh and English cultures have been colliding, trading, and occasionally trying to stamp each other out for centuries. It’s a place with a lot of folk knowledge still in circulation: wassailing traditions, mumming customs, foraging lore, recipes that predate gas hobs, forest management practices that predate the Forestry Commission. Some of it barely surviving. Some of it being reinvented by people who found a shaky 1970s recording on YouTube and went from there.

The argument here isn’t that technology is saving tradition, or that tradition is an antidote to technology. Both positions are boring and wrong. The more interesting question is what happens when they actually meet — when a foraging app runs alongside the knowledge of someone who’s been reading this particular woodland for forty years, when a Facebook group becomes the thing keeping a mumming tradition alive, when a slow cooker makes a medieval stew accessible to someone in a flat with no garden.

Sometimes the technology helps. Sometimes it flattens what it’s trying to preserve. We try to be honest about which is which.

Posts follow the wheel of the year — not as mysticism but as a practical editorial framework, because January in the Forest of Dean is genuinely different from August, and what’s worth doing and eating shifts with it. Recipes with their actual history attached. Foraging guides that acknowledge what apps can’t do. Craft how-tos that tell you what you’ll actually find difficult. Long-form essays about traditions that have been around long enough to deserve more than a quick summary.

The blog is grounded in this specific region because that specificity is the point. Generic folk content is everywhere. What’s harder to find is someone actually standing in Chepstow in January with a horse skull, or following the old foraging paths through the Dean, or making Welsh cakes on a bakestone in a kitchen where they’ve been made for three generations.

If something’s wrong or missing, the comments are real and read.

Posts go up most Fridays. Longer essays on Sundays. The email list gets early notice and occasional things that don’t make it to the blog.