This year (2025) our first camping trip, and therefore the official 'start of the season' came later than usual, and much later than I would have liked! With perfectly good reason though - the start of this year (and the end of the last) had been completely preoccupied with buying our first home. So instead of starting out with some local trips in unpredictable weather (as early spring in the UK can be so hit or miss) our first trip was at the start of May, in Eryri (or Snowdonia National Park), near Llanbedr. We'd stumbled across this site, Rhaeadr Nantcol Waterfalls, when we saw it in a video on social media, which showed the river Cwmnantcol (attempt to pronounce at your own risk) flowing straight through it, dissecting the green fields which were scattered (not rammed - thankfully) with tents and campers. As a child, my first camping trips that I can remember were in north Wales, on the shores of Bala lake, so it's an area that's fairly familiar to me. The video...

Dartmoor National Park. The only, completely legal, safe haven for wild campers in England. Yes, there are plenty of places in both England and Wales where a wild camper can pitch their tent, bivvy, or hammock and enjoy a night immersed in nature, with a very low chance of being spotted and moved on - but that chance is never zero . So if you are a wild camper in the UK, and you're looking for a wild camping experience without bending or breaking any rules (and you don't want to travel to the UK wild campers' Mecca - Scotland) then it is to Dartmoor that you should head.  Wild camping in Dartmoor has been enshrined by law since 1985, and although in the last few years this right has been threatened by land owners in the area (notably when it was banned in 2023 before being appealed by the public and over turned), it still remains the only legal place to wild camp in England. This should make it a special spot for any British outdoor enthusiast, and I have been eager to visi...

 Campsite review: Nearly Wild Camping - Woodland Edge This June I enjoyed my second trip to a Nearly Wild Camping site, near Sparkford in Somerset (for a brief introduction to Nearly Wild Camping please see my previous post here! ). Although I have had my NWC membership since last September, I have so far only managed to use it once, despite seeing lots of wonderful sites on there, it's sometimes difficult to find the time to fit it all in with various other events, trips, and general life! Anyway, myself and two friends were planning a trip, but as one of us lives down in Cornwall, we were trying to find somewhere relatively equidistant, and so, we decided to look in the West Country. For reasons that I have already stated in previous posts , England's West Country has so much to offer campers, and we found an array of sites that looked suitable for our trip, but one stood out above the rest - Woodland Edge. If the name alone wasn't enough, then the pictures of the bushcra...

 Campsite review: Byecross Farm Campsite Byecross Farm Campsite is a small, family run campsite, located on a picturesque farm near Preston - on - Wye, Hereford. There are many such campsites scattered across the width and breadth of the UK, but this one stands out... to me anyway! This campsite was the first that I ever visited without my family, when I was just 17 or 18 (I can't remember the exact date), and so it was the first trip where I actually had to pack all of my own gear and setup on my own. So then, looking back this trip could be described as a momentous occasion, although when I remove the rose tint from the memories, I can remember that it wasn't all sunshine and rainbows! Our party was a group of four, ranging from 17 to 24 in age, and we made the 40 mile journey divided between three vehicles - two heavily laden 125cc motorcycles, and an equally heavily laden 1960s Volkswagen Beetle. At the time, the location of the campsite as given by Google Maps wasn't q...

The Bushcraft Show 2024 I first heard about Bushcraft Magazine's 'Bushcraft Show' from the Wodesman Podcast (shout-out to Tom and Liam!) last year, and although I couldn't go in 2023 due to other plans, I found myself watching lots of YouTube videos many of the people who did go, and I made a mental note that I had to go next year. Fast forward to January 2024, and I was on their website, buying tickets, and already mentally planning the trip. I chose the weekend ticket that included camping, as I really wanted to take my hammock and camp in the woodland on site after seeing so many people doing this on YouTube. At first I wasn't sure if I'd be going on my own, as I didn't know if anyone that I'd usually camp with would fancy going to the show, but I extended the invite to my dad, and being a camping nut himself, he was only too happy to join me for three nights of woodland hammock camping (I think the show was just an added bonus for him). Eventually th...