Cloud Farm – The Art of Camping

We needed a new sleeping bag for our eldest child Alice. We camp in the UK between the outer edge of spring and the chillier end of autumn, and so we plumped for a two-season red Starlight cocoon bag from Go Outdoors. Having outgrown her Vango bag, she enjoyed hunkering down in the extra space of the bag.

Walking along Doone Valley in Devon — Children walking in Doone Valley next to Cloud Farm

We took the new sleeping bag and the rest of our kit back to Cloud Farm in Dorset on the Bank Holiday in August. It was our third visit to the site. They don’t accept reservations and so seemed our best bet on the busiest camping day of the season. The site itself is beginning to look frayed at the edges: the shop not as well-stocked, a set of toilets locked up. But its main advantages outweigh the odd careworn feature: Cloud Farm permit campfires, the pitches line up alongside a shallow river, and the wild of the Doone Valley and the moors is right there. Over the weekend, the children barely left the water, paddling around and daring one another to bound over stepping stones. And finally they were old enough to walk a couple of miles from the site deep into Boone Valley. The footpath into the wild moors leads directly from the site, taking in an impressive variety of butterflies.

At night, we set a campfire to keep away any midges. Alice hunkered down into her new sleeping bag. The sleeping bag has a long heritage. In 1853, Lieutenant Creswell, the first officer ever to cover the north west passage, describes pitching a bet that combined a layer of macintosh with a piece of buffalo robe and a blanket sown up in the form of a bag.
The French douaniers, who watched the mountain passes of the Pyrenean frontier, used sleeping bags with wool inside. When not in use, they were folded up and buckled with five buckles into a knapsack weighing seven pounds – about twice the weight of Alice’s sleeping bag. The douaniers slept out at night in these bags. When traveling on a donkey across the Cevennes, the writer Robert Louis Stevenson adopted this way of camping too, eschewing the tent in favour of a sleeping bag that was six feet square and took a mule to carry it. And since I am the one who lugs the gear in our family, I am much happier with the one and half kilo Starlight cocoon bag than Stevenson’s wool-lined happy sack.

For me, North Devon means idleness. On the edge of Exmoor lies the farmhouse rented by my friends Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, and his girlfriend Victoria. We decided to visit them during a camping tour of the area. Bearing in mind the maxim that house guests, like fish, go off after three days, Cath and I decide to camp near a few miles south of the Idler farmhouse at Cloud Farm, a campsite in the “Doone Valley”, off the coastal road between Lynton and Minehead.

cloud-farm-cloudscape — 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