"I lost everything and ended up living in my car, but then I turned to nature and foraging has turned my life around," James Hill The Forager Within
James Hill is never happier than when foraging in Yorkshire’s fields and woods, passing on his knowledge to others on how to live off the land. But just a few years ago, life was very different – James lost everything and even ended up living in his car. It was confiding in a friend and returning to the nature he loved that saved him, helping to turn his life around.
“Having grown up on a farm in North Yorkshire, I’ve always loved the countryside, food, and the natural world,” he says. “As a young child, I used to pick plums from our trees and sell them on the side of the road – my first taste of foraging and entrepreneurship.
“I have many happy memories of nature walks that my parents would take me on, where we’d observe the wildlife, soak up the trees, pick field mushrooms for dinner, blackberries to eat on the go, nettles for soup, and so on. It’s fair to say I was immersed in nature from an early age. It was always drilled into me and my siblings that picking stuff either from the garden or from the wild was a very normal natural thing to do and something not to be feared.”
He studied agriculture at university with honours in food quality and production, but by the time he had finished his degree, he’d moved well away from the idea of going into farming or even staying in the agricultural or commercial food industry.
“I considered my options and, in the end, did something quite different – I went into the wine industry with a company called Majestic Wine. On the face of it, this was a world away from farming and agriculture, but it did involve learning about viticulture. I spent almost ten happy years in the wine industry and was lucky enough to go on multiple trips worldwide visiting vineyards and wineries as special treats for sales performance.”
It was while working for Majestic Wine that his marriage ended, and he started experimenting in trading. “I was either good at it or lucky, or both,” he says. “I’d always had a burning desire to work for myself and be my own boss, and so I quit the wine industry and went into trading and investing full time.”
But soon James started to spiral. “For a while after quitting my job, I lived the dream. It went from trading to high-risk trading to out-and-out gambling. In 2012 I was on top of the world, but by 2014 I’d lost everything and ended up sleeping in my car for six months. I hit rock bottom in 2015, having gone through mental, emotional and financial hell.
“I should have come clean earlier than I did, but I just thought my family and friends would be really angry with me. But I did email one friend and just said, ‘My life’s over, I’m done’. He emailed me back full of positivity, telling me that my life was far from over. He immediately dropped everything, came to see me and made me realise the only way out of it was to be honest and come clean to my family.
“I thought they would disown me, but completely the opposite was true. They just wanted to help me get back on my feet.” James then started the long journey of rebuilding his life.
“I got a simple job, and then one day, a couple of months after it all came to a head, I rediscovered nature. I went for a walk with the same friend I’d talked to initially in the Lake District, and there were lots of mushrooms around because it was autumn. He was into foraging, and that sparked a conversation that reignited the love and fascination I had as a child for the natural world, and from there I bought my first foraging book.”
Initially, James’s foraging was nothing more than a hobby and a way of helping his mental health. “From a hobby it grew into something of an obsession, but I never thought that it would ever become a business.” By 2019, he started to think that maybe he could turn it into something more.
During the lockdowns of 2020 and early 2021, James was furloughed from his job in the travel industry and took the opportunity to accelerate and double down on his foraging skills, even taking a foraging diploma.
In late 2022, with the help of his new wife, who convinced him he knew more than he thought he did, he decided to launch the Forager Within in Huddersfield, teaching others the dos and don’ts of foraging.
“We started leafleting in Huddersfield. I’d launched a simple website, but no one really knew where to find us, so we went back to good old-fashioned legwork – putting leaflets through people’s letterboxes, just to get enough people to fill one course so that we could see how it went.”
Ten people signed up, and the course went down well, and so a month later James decided to hold another one. “I started to do videos as well, and they started to get some good traction on social media, and numbers started to grow, but it was still very much a side hustle.”
But as numbers and demand for courses grew, James started to think that he could make a living out of the Forager Within. “It just took off, and in 2024 I went full-time and now do courses in Huddersfield, Sheffield, Northallerton and Manchester.”
James starts the course by introducing people to foraging, the benefit of seasonality and how to stay safe. “I talk people through my approach, which is caution – not to be frightened of anything – nothing is going to jump down your throat; you are in control – but caution is a good thing. There are some plants and mushrooms out there which are deadly toxic even in small amounts. The most important thing initially is the learning rather than the eating. Using at least two good-quality sources for their identification, and after all that, if there is any doubt, then don’t eat it.
“Then, depending on the course, we will go for about a one-mile walk, which I lead, and I will point out things, and people will ask me questions about things they have spotted. We discuss it, they see it and smell it, and we talk about how to identify it and what to do with it.
“If we find things that are toxic, we talk about those as well. My aim is that people go away from that walk, seeing the countryside through a different lens. People often say that a walk will never be the same again.”
James likes to point out a mixture of edible plants from things people might already know, but also things they probably won’t know are edible. It depends on the season; in the spring he focuses on the greens from wild garlic to other wild alliums, common hogweed – a member of the carrot family – and cow parsley.
“Even the leaves of certain trees in spring are decent for salads, like the linden tree.”
In the summer the focus turns to fruit – sloes, damsons and other berries and flowers and seeds. “The leaves of nettles are edible in the spring, but then in July and August the seeds can be eaten. But autumn is the most varied time for foraging. The main focus is mushrooms, but there are late-season fruits.”
He has now moved back to Northallerton with his wife, Anita, and son, Dalton. “Since the day I hit rock-bottom, my life has only got better,” he says. “I’m proud of how quickly and well I recovered and rebuilt my life. The transformation has been remarkable, and I can honestly say I have built a life of happiness, fulfilment and world-class mental health through a lot of hard work and support from family and best friends. Reconnecting to nature has undoubtedly helped me to rebuild.”