It is half past eight on a wet Saturday night and I have no idea where my children are. Normally, they’d both be in bed at this time but, instead, I am staring into the pouring rain and shouting their names at the top of my voice.
“Oh, come inside. Nothing can happen to them here,” sighs my sister-in-law Rosalind, used to my overprotective instincts. We are staying in a giant tent, pitched on Bouncers Farm near Maldon in Essex. It’s the kind of thing you might expect to see on a luxury safari in Africa. The tent has a wood floor, a flush lavatory, rustic furniture, knick-knacks, artfully teacrate-clad walls and photographs of local fauna – plus three separate bedrooms with mattresses and duvets provided. We are talking by candlelight, and two oil lamps give the interior a warm Victorian glow.
Cooking on the campfire: three easy recipes
“Food tastes incredible when eaten outdoors; fresh air seems somehow to freshen the palate and intensify the flavours,” write Tess Carr and Kat Heyes in their 2007 handbook The Happy Campers (Bloomsbury, £14.99) .
The recipes below are taken from their book. The best time to start cooking on your campfire is when the flames have died down and the wood has turned white.
Baked fish in the weekend newspapers
The size of your fish doesn’t matter; big fish will take longer to cook, but will look impressive, especially salmon and sea bass.● Dip a sheet of newspaper in water and quickly wrap it around the fish. Repeat until you have about ten sheets around each fish, then tie it up with string.
● Place the parcel(s) in the embers and turn occasionally. (The paper won’t catch fire. Do have more water handy, though, in case it does ignite and needs dampening again).
● Check your fish when the newspaper starts to blacken.
Push a knife into the densest part, near the backbone. A little resistance means it is cooked; too much means it needs longer.Chocolate mousse
This is great to make while camping as it doesn’t need to be kept in the fridge. Experiment with scented chocolate, or add brandy or chilli for an extra kick.300ml thick double cream (or soya cream: this won’t go off)
2x 150g bars of dark chocolate (70 per cent)● Melt the chocolate in a bowl over simmering water. Remove from the heat and leave to cool slightly.
● Mix in the cream and leave to set in a cool place.Campfire biscuits
You’ll need a thin stick for this, about 1cm thick and 50cm long, and some aluminium foil. Try substituting rolled porridge oats for some of the flour and adding mixed spice.85g butter
55g soft brown sugar
2 cups plain flour
2 eggs● Beat together the butter and sugar. Add the flour and eggs and mix well to make the biscuit dough.
● Wrap the end of your stick with foil. Make a ball of dough roughly the size of a small tangerine and push this on the end of the stick.
● Hold the stick over the hot embers of your fire until the biscuit is a rich, golden brown on the outside.
● Pull the biscuit off the stick and fill the hole that’s left with butter and (preferably homemade) jam.
We’d arrived at Bouncers Farm early that morning, in the drizzle, in foul tempers because we had got very lost. There’s no satnav in my car, just a reluctant driver and a seven-year-old map reader. My husband had refused to come on this (or any) camping trip. My sister-in-law and her kids agreed to come but she couldn’t join us until the evening. Ahead of me lay a day with two squabbling kids, no TV and a load of rain.
But as soon as the children got out of the car, changed into brand-new wellies (there’s not much call for that sort of footwear in Camden Town) and had spotted the hens, the dogs and the pony – things took a more promising turn.
Ann Bishop and her father, Robbie, showed us the “honesty shop” with its freshly baked bread and freshly laid eggs. We took our suitcases on wheelbarrows down a steep hill and through mud into a small cherry orchard overlooking glorious fields. Even the rain couldn’t take the edge off the excitement when we saw our tent. At nine metres, it is bigger than our living room.
And now, as 9pm approaches, I hear whispers through the rain and the fuzzy sound of wet anorak rubbing against foliage. Four cousins are creeping back to base after a lengthy spying adventure. They materialise out of the woods, completely sodden and wielding unsuitably large sticks. My four-year-old boy has a faraway, grown-up look that I have never seen before. This is freedom. This is camping.
Except it isn’t. It’s glamping, a fashionable fusion (the word comes from “glamorous camping”) of canvas with luxury. What glamping offers is a close-to-nature experience, with the rough edges taken off. Glamping means you don’t wake up in the morning with a stiff back – there’s a proper bed involved in any glamping trip.
My route into this world came through Feather Down Farm Days, the British offshoot of a Dutch company, which has tents pitched on 21 farms across England, Scotland and Wales. Glamping is not cheap – a Feather Down Farm weekend can cost up to £395 in high summer, more expensive than staying inside a farmhouse in a cosy B&B bedroom – but that is not the point. And Feather Down is far from the top end for “glamping”: that prize goes to Camp Kerala, serving Glastonbury festival-goers and Cowes yachting enthusiasts with traditional Indian-made tents, luxurious trimmings and a 24-hour concierge. It costs £7,000 (plus VAT) per couple at Glastonbury, with tents at the forthcoming Cowes Week much cheaper at £2,600 (plus VAT) for the eight-night festival.
“Glamping” business opportunities extend far beyond family and festival camping. Edward Wright, a former marketing executive who runs Devon-based World Inspired Tents with his wife Donna, imports tipis from Sweden for sale. He also hires out giant versions of his tents, which can be joined together as a fashionable alternative to a marquee – and he has been asked to set up a tented “village” with tended log fires alongside the main event tent. “Guests can just retire to their tent to sleep. It makes for a really special venue,” Wright says.
The glamping entrepreneurs are catering to our modern taste for a slightly tamed outdoors. It’s a craze reaching its zenith in this summer’s ridiculously large crop of outdoor music festivals, each offering a pricey range of camping options, with old buses, American Frontier wagons and beach huts joining the ranks of ready-furnished yurts and tipis. (Campers at the sold-out Isle of Wight Bestival in September, for example, can still pay £980 for a ship’s cabin sleeping four people. The festival tickets will have been another £130 per person.)
Back in 2004, when Luite Moraal founded Feather Down Farm Days in Holland, camping was still decidedly unfashionable. But Moraal knows what northern Europeans like and had worked for Center Parcs in its native Holland and then, in 1987, was involved in bringing the concept to Britain. The forest-based holiday camps have since become the Butlins of the Boden-clad classes.
Once Moraal had set up in business on his own, he focused on the same target customers – the urban bourgeoisie worried about their children not getting enough experience of being in a natural environment. Then friends working at the Dutch equivalent of the National Trust, one of the country’s biggest landowners, told him that their tenant farmers were struggling to make enough money to stay on the land. He realised a new sort of farm holiday could benefit both parties.
Feather Down chooses partner farms, providing each with a clutch of beautiful tents. Booking and payment is done centrally. Moraal launched in the UK less than two years ago and has recently opened in France – as Un Lit au Pré, with a farm in Normandy – just right for Channel-hopping glampers.
At Bouncers Farm, Ann Bishop had only started taking guests a month before we arrived. But she received her first booking within hours of her details going live on the company website. She was already almost fully booked for the summer. Feather Down isn’t designed to become a mass market attraction, and most farms are only allowed to host five to seven tents. But glamping isn’t without its tensions, even when you are staying hundreds of yards away from other guests.
At the well-stocked “honesty shop” (all Feather Down farms have these – guests write down what they have taken and settle at the end of the stay), we almost caused a diplomatic incident. After eating some fresh croissants, we were pounced on by other campers who believed we’d rustled their reserved pastries.
There’s another potent force lurking in glamping – its old-fashioned wholesomeness fits into a collective nostalgia that is driving the much wider camping-and-festival revival. The “book of the trend” is The Happy Campers (Bloomsbury), a gorgeous-looking piece of canvas-lust packed with practical tips, recipes and photos of the 1970s camping heyday and happy contemporary friends gathered round delicious fire-cooked food.
Kat Heyes, its co-author, believes that though the retro-inspired camping boom may have started with the children of 1970s campers, it has gone far beyond that now. “I speak to many people who are going camping for the first time. Everyone would like to live in the countryside but it’s not practical – camping is a way of doing that for a couple of days.”
What has shifted since the 1970s is that now it’s not just about what you do – it’s how you do it. Our love of camping (and even more, glamping) owes a lot to modern fogeyness, that floral sprigged world of comfy, upmarket brands like Toast, Boden and Cath Kidston. Heyes likes bell tents, old-fashioned structures that are quick to put up, look great and can be filled with rugs, throws, sheepskins and a communal vibe – probably including guitars – that, I confess, is alien to uptight people like me. “Now all my friends have these tents,” says Heyes. “When we go camping there’s a whole village of them.”
Until recently, simple canvas camping was a means to an end – usually as part of a cycling or hiking holiday, or a way of travelling from A to B cheaply. Now the camping itself is the excitement. The recent vogue for all things canvas predated the current credit crunch – although its appeal as a way of cutting leisure costs is becoming more important as reality bites. A survey reported in the FT in May showed that online holiday searches for “camping” had trebled while “villa” searches had slumped.
I can’t work out whether my desire to try out more camping is just a shallow reaction to its new-found fame and the appeal of a lovely-looking tent on a glorious English summer day; or whether its popularity has triggered something innate in me – perhaps in all of us – that makes us wants to hang out with nature.
Another clue to camping’s new appeal is its simplicity in an otherwise complex and gadget-laden world. Kate Wallace, a lecturer and avid camper, lives in Norwich with her lawyer husband and their two small children. “When you camp, the little things take up all your time, and it doesn’t matter that it takes ages. A whole day is taken up by preparing breakfast, washing up, cooking again. That’s what people like and it’s how people used to live. The blokes like chopping wood and making the fire.”
What many campers long for, in fact, is “wild camping” – a corner of a secret farmer’s field with very few (or no) other campers, wood to collect nearby, no rules on fires and no facilities. Details of these special places are only passed on by word of mouth.
Cathy Challinor, a graphic designer, does a lot of wild camping near her Sussex home but has also been to a Feather Down Farm. She is going again with a group of families later this year. “When you first see those tents you think ‘wow’ but when you are actually living in them and doing all the work it doesn’t seem that posh at all. It is still quite hard work.”
Feather Down Farm campers have to light and maintain their wood-burning stove. It took me two hours to get the temperature hot enough to boil water for tea and make scrambled eggs for lunch. But once served, they tasted better than any eggs we have eaten before.
While we sat, ravenous, waiting for the bloody stove to heat up, we improvised – a proper camping thing to do – and ate a whole packet of Rich Tea biscuits. The children loved the biscuit binge. In fact, they loved everything about the weekend. Afterwards Freya, my seven-year-old, said it was “the best thing we have ever done”.
So now we really do have to go again. But next time, I am also going to take a little camping stove. Just a tip from an old camping hand.
