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.