‘Picnic Point’ in ‘Three Men in a Boat’ by Jerome K Jerome

A trio of liverish young men and their dog float up the Thames in a camping skiff. They finally pitch their tent at a spot called Picnic Point, near Runnymede, a very pleasant nook under a great elm tree. Yanking the hooped canvas over the boat almost defeats them, but the effort of camping is rewarded; they wake to a soft morning, the river in sunlight, and a view of timeless Englishness.

Mesquite country, Southwest Texas in ‘Freedom’ by Jonathan Franzen

Walter Berglund rejects the corporate way, and takes his young lover Lalitha camping. It’s been a hell of ride for Walter. This camp, filled with birdsong and empty of people, is a blissful interval between crisis and tragedy. Jonathan Franzen recently wrote of his own experiences camping alone on Selkirk Island (reputedly Crusoe’s island) to commemorate his friend and writer, David Foster Wallace.

Jackson’s Island, ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain

The densely wooded Jackson’s Island stands in the middle of the Mississippi River. Huck sets up camp here for three nights. He picks strawberries and green summer grapes, lands catfish and roasts them over a campfire. Islands are lonesome places; Huck smokes, counts the stars, and inspires generations of boys to follow him outdoors.

Swallowdale valley in ‘Swallowdale’ by Arthur Ransome

With their raft shipwrecked, the Swallows climb over a waterfall and discover the perfect valley campsite. With steep sheltering sides, a stream running through it, a pool for the washing up and a secret cave, the craggy landscape of Arthur Ransome’s Swallowdale offers handholds for the imagination of children and adults alike.

A rainbow over Comrie Crieff campsite

Five campsites

Comrie Croft, Braincroft, Crieff, Perthshire PH7 4JZ

Campers are rightly afraid of Scotland’s voracious midge, but even in August I found the high meadow of this campsite, with a spectacular view of the surrounding glen, blissfully midge-free. Campfires are permitted, so I perfected the art of baking eggs, fresh from the site chickens, on a grill in foil parcels.

Gwalia Farm, Cemaes, Machynlleth, Powys, SY20 9PZ

If you like rough camping on a tiny campsite, then the overgrown Gwalia is an excellent cheap option, deep in the hills of mid-Wales. Consisting of a few pitches around the back of a B&B, and allowing campfires, Gwalia is a peaceful and amenable spot.

Forgewood, Sham Farm Road, Danegate, Nr Tunbridge Wells, Kent, TN3 9JD

Our first camp last year was at Forgewood, on the Eridge Park Estate. The estate is enormous, with a modest camping field surrounded by ancient woodland in which you can also camp. We pitched our tent in a glade and cooked venison stew – deer are hunted in the park – over the fire.

Grizedale Campsite, Bowkerstead Farm, Satterthwaite, Ulverston, Cumbria

A friendly, busy site near Grizedale Forest in the Lake District. There are no allocated pitches, and fires are allowed, but an order of sorts emerges and soon a low cloud of campsite smoke drifts over the fells.

Mannix Point in Caherciveen, Kerry

Located at the westernmost tip of the Ring of Kerry, on the outskirts of Caherciveen, campsite owner Mortimer has crafted some beautiful pitches from which you can watch the waters flow into Valentia Bay. There is a music room for ad-hoc singalongs and a campers’ kitchen, which really helps if it rains.

For more campsite recommendations, use our uk campsite map

The beginning of this century has seen a rehabilitation of the reputation of camping. There are demographic reasons for this – the rise of a new generation of campers with peak outdoors experiences at festivals – and economic reasons – a middle class adjusting to a decline in income by embracing the simple, cheap pleasure of sleeping under the stars. The culture wants an alternative to screen-based lives of work and play, and camping is one option. But not camping as it used to be.

The tiny Welsummer campsite in Kent shows us how much camping has benefitted from shrinkage. It is a small site of twenty pitches set over two cosy meadows and a handful of rugged pitches in a dense wood. An hour and half’s cross-country drive from our home in Lewes, and within reach of a late evening dash from London, Welsummer campsite is run by Med and Laura Benaggoune, a couple in the early forties who lived together in France before returning to Laura’s home in Kent.

Med and I share a cup of tea. “Where else in Europe you would encounter a site like Welsummer?” I ask. Italy? the Czech republic? The Netherlands? Certainly not in France. “This is not how the French camp,” says Med. “The campfires would be impossible” – dry Southern France is a tinderbox – “ and French campers expect a bar, a disco, a playground.” In other words, everything that the modern British camper eschews. But why have we turned our back on such facilities?

The formula is simple: the smaller the site, the fewer the rules, the greater the freedom. Welsummer has a minimum of signage: in a small site, a friendly word from the owner replaces a blizzard of forbidding notices. Cars must be parked in an adjacent field, which always makes a site more child-friendly and less like a car park. There is a family bathroom, a blessing for anyone who has ever tried to shower three small children in a cubicle, and pre-erected bell tents for metropolitan glampers, keen to dip a Converse galousher in the camping lifestyle. Everyone’s children glom together into a tribe and disappear into the woods. That’s all we ask of camping: freedom for the children, from the children.

Book Welsummer.

Matthew De Abaitua’s book The Art of Camping: The History and Practice of Sleeping Under the Stars is published by Hamish Hamilton in July. Order this new camping book from Amazon.

A wood is also a church. A pagan church. The tall pines and beech make a vaulted ceiling, the light scattered by the leaves resembles the coloured patterns thrown by a stained glass window, and there is serenity standing amongst the cool indifference of trees. In this church, the campfire is the altar, the heart of our veneration.

Over the winter, I had acquired more woodcraft gear with which to perfect my campfire craft: a Gränsfors Bruks hatchet, Opinel pocket saw and a Finnish muurikka. The hatchet and saw turned deadwood into kindling, and the campfire turned the muurikka into a sizzling skillet, a cross between a wok and a large frying pan set on three short legs providing maximum cooking area for minimum fuel to feed a hungry family.

Over the weekend, Cath cooked bacon and pancakes, pork chops, apples and gnocchi, and fried breakfast for five. Pancakes cooked in pork fat over the campfire then drizzled with maple syrup is a classic American dish that derives from the epicures of the American wilderness – the camp cookery of Horace Kephart of the Smoky Mountains or Nessmuk of the Adirondacks.

We did not explore much at Forgewood; rumours of ice caves and a ruined castle went unconfirmed. We took the two small children out for a woodland stroll and surprised a deer that bolted away with a flash of a white tail. Over three days, we barely left camp. Camp is a place of minor tasks, with wood to chop, food to prepare, children to dust down and local venison to stew. Rather than explore the woods, I appreciated them with a cup of tea in my hand: the birdsong that always sounds to me like a data stream; the fat atoms of blossom tumbling idly through the spokes of a pine tree; a game of rounders in the adjacent meadow, and boyish shouts of ‘out’, ‘out, ‘out’; a robin impudent on a branch; the distant rifle shots of a deer hunt: and then dusk; the tea in my mug replaced with beer; the meadow passive and misty as the sun set over it with such anger I was concerned for its blood pressure; in its place, an enormous yellow moon rose between coppiced trunks and spread reassuring bands of light across the meadow; estranged owls hooted late night booty calls and dark trees twitched their fibres – the wood seethed like a nervous system and I was drunk and alive – and then, at last, I called it a night, doused the campfire, and instantly vanished in a blow-out of steam, the clean scent of water vapour rushing around my face and into my nostrils like dry ice in a nightclub.

At Forgewood, woodland solitude is offset by a more sociable camp atmosphere in the meadows. A commitment to ‘real camping’ means no caravans and no electric hook ups, and adequate facilities. Forgewood is situated on part of the estate of the Marquess of Abergavenny. The question that I have been puzzling over – how could England offer more of the wild camping that Scotland enjoys by law – could find an answer in the aristocracy and other major landowners. The new generation of real campers are prepared to pay more for a nightly pitch than previous ones, yet expect less in the way of facilities. What we are looking for and paying for is a raw experience with campfires and clean running water. Some landowners and aristocrats have experimented with festivals as a way of making their land pay – but it takes considerable experience and patience to build a successful festival, as Peregrine and Catherine St Germans have proved at Port Eliot. The investment into a large woodland campsite seems less risky than the one big outlay of a festival; now that campers do not demand electrification and tarmac roads to all their pitches, is there an emerging business model in the cultural shift to campfire camping for big landowners?

For the rest of us, it’s unlikely that we could ever afford the sheer expanse of land required for a more solitary camping experience. The need to maximise the return on every mortgaged acre leads to the depressing car park campsite that is all too familiar in the UK. For landowners seeking to balance financial return with the status of a custodian of the countryside, the likes of Forgewood promise financial return without excessive development. Protecting the forests requires managed access: when people have the opportunity to experience these places, they become advocates for their preservation. As camping returns to the spirit of its origins, the camper – historically treated as a nuisance – could be the solution to investing in and protecting the nation’s woodland.

Gwalia Farm is a field around the back of a vegetarian bed and breakfast. Beside a narrow road, there is a rough shoulder where you park up and then trot a dozen yards down to a gate. Beyond the gate there is an overgrown field with half a dozen or so large pitches cut out of the long grass. There is gulley running across the field, a rivulet trickling through it, and after a quick scramble to the woods, there are the latrines – or “lats” as rough campers call them. Holes in the ground. There is a proper WC back at the bed and breakfast. Just past the wood, on the other side of a fence, a pond where some young lads foolishly camped.

"The lats". My mother would never have stood for this

I watched the gang of young men set their camp. They were no different than we had been all those years ago, compelled to come out into the country for some freedom and fire. Upon arriving, they discovered that the thirty-five-hour-a-week shifts they put in consuming entertainment media had in no way equipped them for camp. Never before had I witnessed an attempt to pitch a tent in a bog. Beside a wild pond surrounded by tall grass, they gallumphed around for fire wood, bringing back the greenest, dampest looking branches; I suspect they tried to light the wood directly with a zippo. A couple of hours later, they came to visit our camp, lured in by the smell of wood smoke and the leg of lamb roasting over the campfire.
“I don’t think we should have camped in a bog,” said one lad, shirtless and tattooed.
“The campfire’s not…” his friend hesitated.
“It’s not working.”
“You will need a campfire to keep away the insects,” Cath observed. “Because you’ll get a lot of midges and mosquitos near that pond.”

Their disconsolate scratching was eloquent on this matter, even if they were not. Still, I understood how difficult it was to ask for help in setting a campfire, (not that they asked directly for help; the lads presented their wounds like a dog with an injured paw, and hoped that I would infer what was required.) It is embarrassing to admit that you cannot make fire, that the basic technology of humanity eludes you. I gave them a couple of firelighters, some dry wood and a smouldering log. As they loped back to their sinking, midge-ridden camp, I briefly entertained the fantasy of a network of sites like Gwalia Farm spread across the country, rough and ready glades where young people could learn to build Indian shelters, and set campfires, get out of bedrooms and the forecourts of late-night supermarkets to take risks in nature rather than the plastic risks of video games, a fantasy in which camping in Britain is dedicated to the call of the campfire.

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The campsite is at the end of a winding woodland path, necessitating a twenty minute trek pushing your kit in a wheelbarrow. I have no wheelbarrow skills, never having worked on a building site, and it was only last weekend when I barrowed my kit across the entire length of Glastonbury that I discovered the trick of tying all your gear together and then securing the heaped bundle to the barrow with an X of rope. So I made more of a meal of this task at Dernwood than was necessary.

The allure of wild camping is freedom. Freedom to have a campfire, freedom to arrange your camp as you see fit. And there is plenty of freedom at Dernwood. Our party consisted of a dozen adults and a dozen children, so the pitch-where-you-like system meant we could circle our wagons as we pleased.

My campfire skills are basic. I set bricks around a shallow fire pit, and sparked up the logs. The job of building and maintaining this fire was quickly taken up by two more experienced firebugs, and soon they were prepping wood, and erecting an ad-hoc cooking tripod from cast-iron lantern stands. The sight of iron and fire made my heart leap, and the boys crowded around the men, fascinated by this primal display.

Wild camping demands responsibility, especially when it comes to waste. At Dernwood Farm, I barrowed everyone’s rubbish back to the recycling bins at the entrance. When you spend the best part of an hour “putting the bins out” you are confronted with the fact of your own consumption. All that thoughtlessly acquired packaging at the supermarket comes back to haunt you. Most wild camping sites make no provision for rubbish. You are expected to take it away with you, and this is something to consider when you are loading up.

The facilities at Dernwood Farm stretch to a single WC toilet and water pipe. Check in at the farm on your way in to pay for your pitch and firewood. They also have freezers of their meat for sale.

At sunset, Cloud Farm staged a spectacular display of Gavs: a low mauve cloudscape gathered underneath a spectrum of purples enlivened with a streak of red

Of all the places we camped that rainy August, Cloud Farm was my favourite, and I will return. Like all good sites, you are encouraged to park away from the tents, only driving down to pitch or pack up. There was a good shop stocked with real ale and a cafe that the locals spoke warmly about. We wandered down to a pair of small fields and pitched beside a river, which was fenced off from our inquiring toddlers. Snug between the flanks of the valley, I set a fire. The last time I saw Tom, he demonstrated his device for checking the moisture level in logs; the Cloud Farm shop sold some wickedly dry wood, and soon I was roasting marshmellows over its uninhibited dancing flames.
I spent most of my twenties working and writing for The Idler. As Deputy Editor, I was part of a trio consisting of Tom, myself and art director and co-founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney.

Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Matthew De Abaitua and Tom Hodgkinson of The Idler

Situated in Clerkenwell in the 1990s and the fun bit of the new millennium, we took full advantage of the city. Since those happy carefree days, each of us has sought out an individual vision of the English pastoral: while I beaver away on a book about camping, Tom’s bestseller How To Be Free posits a way of life that draws on medievalism and rural self-sufficiency; Gavin has enjoyed such international success with his Cloudspotting books that I can no longer gaze up at the clouds without thinking of him. My daughter even calls clouds “Gavs”.

At sunset, Cloud Farm staged a spectacular display of Gavs: a low mauve cloudscape gathered underneath a spectrum of purples enlivened with a streak of red. Purple is the colour of inbetween, the veil between reality and imagination, day and night. For a moment, I was transported out of my immediate responsibilities, that carousel of Dad Tasks, and experienced a sense of well-being that lasted until the sun went down; the silent knowing wisdom of idleness about which we had spent our hectic twenties extolling, but rarely experiencing.

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Doone Valley
Oare, Lynton, EX35 6NU
01598 741 234

I feel most alive when I am camping. My first response, on finding myself jobless in late Spring, was that my family should spend the summer camping

The moon is taken seriously at Plaw Hatch Farm, a small two hundred acre biodynamic farm near Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Biodynamic agriculture was devised by Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy and a respectable figure in the progressive underground that flourished in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Steiner’s thought is broadly categorised as spiritual science; he sought to unify science’s exacting practicality with mankind’s mystical yearnings. Biodynamic farming belongs to the later practical phase of Steiner’s philosophy, bringing together sound practices we now recognise as mainstream due to the organic food movement, with a touch of the occult: preparations made from cow horn and crystals infuse the soil with cosmic forces, while the respective rhythms of the earth, the moon and the cosmos influence the planting calendar.

Biodynamic cows at Plaw Hatch Farm

The biodynamic farm aspires to a closed system: the animals are born and reared on the farm, and their manure fertilises the grass that feeds the animals which in turn produces more manure. At Plaw Hatch Farm, the cycle encompasses lambs, sheep and pigs, chickens and ducks, a rabbit field, cows, a milking shed and polytunnels of vegetables. And two beehives. New inputs into the system – such as campers – are taken in reluctantly.

I have long felt that camping could hold the key to a new way of life, and there was certainly an appetite for a new way of life in the economic wreckage

I feel most alive when I am camping. My first response, on finding myself jobless in late Spring, was that my family should spend the summer camping. After two rainy summers of commuting and childcare, the long-term weather forecast predicted a barbecue British summer. More prosaically, the pound was weak against the euro and the British public were pulling their horns in as the economy collapsed. So economically and meteorologically, the summer of camping seemed the fit response to unemployment. More than that, I have long felt that camping could hold the key to a new way of life, and there was certainly an appetite for a new way of life in the economic wreckage. The summer was my chance to explore the meaning and history of camping and how it related to a new view of society, our approach to parenting, even my manhood. The long boom was the era of Big Tent politics, in which our leaders drew together disparate factions under the promise of endless economic growth, a promise that seemed free of ideology. That era was over, and it was time to discover what Little Tent politics might bring. Instead of house prices, I would think only of tents and where to pitch them. As an article in the LA Times on music festivals noted, there was a “growing prominence of temporary structures in a world suddenly drained of capital.” Camping seemed a fit response to the failed property cult.

Alfred's perspective on the wood pile

As dawn rose, the children stirred. The summer of camping would change their lives also; for the better, I hoped. There was a great deal for them to learn at Plaw Hatch Farm. About bees, for example. My son was only two years old and had never seen a bee dutifully fly between the long spears of purple-hued grass. We laid down together to watch the worker’s toil. Every time the bee buzz-hopped over the meadow grass to light upon a wild flower, Alfred laughed at the unexpected comedy of nature.

Bees are eunuchs in Nature’s harem

Gazing back down the valley toward Plaw Hatch Farm

Making this detour by way of the beehive, the entire cosmos can find its way into human beings