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...

 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...

The first wild camp of the year to me has become synonymous with winter camping. I've only been going for wild camping trips in the winter months for the last few years, but in that short space of time they have quickly become one of the trips that I most look forward to. When the temperatures are low, and the weather is dry it makes for great conditions in the forest. The warmth and light produced by a camp fire are appreciated far more greatly when the days are short and cold, which I think adds to the magic of back-to-basics wild camping. Late season camping requires both planning and the right gear, but when you employ both, it can be just as comfortable, and enjoyable as any summer camp in my opinion.  We had initially aimed to have a winter camp in December 2023, but along with reasonably mild temperatures, the final month of the year had also been plagued with wet weather - so we pushed our plans through to January and the trip subsequently became the first trip of 2024. The...