Bushcraft Notches: The Basic Knife Cuts and Their Uses

Bushcraft notches let you join two sticks, hang a pot over the fire or protect the head of a tarp peg, and nearly all of them are cut on the same principle. Cuts across the grain mark out the notch, then angled slices clear the wood between them, and you go back over those cross cuts as the notch deepens. Six forms cover most of what a camp needs: the pot hanger, the V notch, the saddle notch, the diameter reduction, the square section and the bevelled peg head.

The try stick, where most people learn bushcraft notches

The bushcraft school Woodland Ways teaches bushcraft notches on a try stick. Woodland Ways explains the exercise on its blog: a single stick on which you work, from one end to the other, through the cuts you will need in the woods. The instructor Mors Kochanski developed it in the 1960s as a teaching aid, combining techniques from a scouting pamphlet on one piece of wood.

You practise each form calmly, and the same stick shows you which bushcraft notches come out clean and which still split. Woodland Ways lists thirteen of them, from a simple trimmed end to a square mortice. Each cut then finds its place in camp.

Choosing the wood and getting the blade ready

Woodland Ways suggests a straight stick, as free of knots as you can find, about the thickness of your thumb, which it puts at 2 to 3 cm, and as long as the distance from your armpit to your fingertips. Willow works particularly well, and the school’s own demonstration uses hazel. Green wood is fine to carve, though slightly drier wood shrinks less, which matters when bushcraft notches have to stay locked together.

For the tool itself, our guide to knife, axe or saw for each camp job helps you pick a blade for this fine work. Both schools quoted here insist on a sharp edge, so before your first session, bring yours back with our method for sharpening a bushcraft knife.

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Carving bushcraft notches without cutting yourself

Paul Kirtley, founder and lead instructor of Frontier Bushcraft, has written a full piece on bushcraft knife safety on his school’s blog. His basic rule is simple: cut away from your body and away from your limbs. He points out that cutting the major artery on the inside of your leg is potentially fatal.

He suggests working seated with your elbows on your knees, which keeps the knife away from your legs. The forehand grip is the one you will use most of the time, and he describes it as allowing powerful, safe cuts. He also asks you to pay particular attention to the hand that is not holding the knife, the one steadying the stick.

Keep some space around you as well: if someone is within an arm’s reach, they are too close. Put the knife back in its sheath whenever you set the stick down, since Kirtley calls the sheath the safest place for a blade, and carry a small first aid kit on you to patch up a cut.

The beaked pot hanger

A pot hanger is a stick cut with several notches, hung over the fire, that holds the handle of a pot or kettle. Paul Kirtley walks through carving beaked notch pot hangers step by step. Start from a straight shoot with a side branch, keep the main stem long and trim the side branch to about 2 cm from the junction, so that the stub becomes the hook at the bottom. Trim off any stem below the join as well, or it will catch on lids.

The notches go on the main stem, on the same side as the hook, along an imaginary vertical line. For each one, cut an X centred on that line: its two strokes are stop cuts, and they fix exactly where the notch will sit. Then slice at an angle away from the hook, pushing on the back of the blade with the thumb of your free hand to keep the cut under control.

The stop cut is shallow at first, so take care not to overshoot it. After a slice or two, go back into it to deepen it, then alternate between the two sides of the X while leaving the small triangle of wood at the top intact. Once the cuts are established, undercut them slightly until the notch is deep enough, and never take wood out from under the beak, which would only weaken it. A row of notches lets you change the height of the pot, even with the pot already hanging.

V and saddle notches for joining two sticks

When two sticks cross, Woodland Ways describes two bushcraft notches that lock one into the other. The V notch takes a second stick whose end has been shaped into a triangular edge. Work one side of the V, then the other, widening it on each pass until you reach the middle of the stick.

The saddle notch takes a round stick laid across it. It is a rounded hollow carved halfway through, as wide as the stick that will sit in it. The school cuts it with the curved part of the blade, from belly to tip, using a rotating slicing action. Both of these bushcraft notches are useful whenever two pieces have to cross without sliding.

Diameter reductions, square sections and the knife-tip mortice

Some bushcraft notches go all the way round the stick. A diameter reduction is there to take a leather strap or a cord, for a toggle or a carry handle. Woodland Ways makes two parallel cuts around the stick, removes the wood between them, and recuts both lines as it goes so the wood does not split beyond them.

A square section follows the same method and leaves flat faces, which add friction between two sticks lashed together. The school also lists a 90-degree latch notch, half V notch and half straight notch, used to make a latch. The knife-tip mortice opens a square hole for a lashing: thin the stick to about a third of its diameter, outline the square with the tip across the grain, then lift out the chips from both sides. A square hole avoids the fuzzy edges that a rotating drilling action can leave.

A peg head bevelled at 45 degrees

The first of the bushcraft notches on the try stick protects the top of tent pegs and of anything else that gets struck. Woodland Ways makes repeated cuts at about 45 degrees all round the end until the tip can be snapped off, then flattens the head. That bevel shields the top of the peg from the blows that drive it in.

For a shelter sheet, our guide on how to pitch a tarp shows where those pegs go for each setup and each kind of weather.

Which notch to carve for which camp job

To build up your bushcraft notches, follow the order of the Woodland Ways try stick, which starts with the trimmed end and the diameter reduction before the pot hanger and the joints. Work seated with your elbows on your knees, and sheath the blade between two bushcraft notches, as Paul Kirtley recommends.