Whats the attraction of wild camping?

[gunwharfman]

When my wife and I had motor caravans (the over-the-cab bed types) we always camped on sites, so much easier and less to worry about, break-ins, etc and we had a small motorbike on the back. Then we deiced to buy a motor caravan which we could use as a car as well, so we downsized to a VW type camper. We then found we could park in all sorts of places for free. We always worked on the principle of parking in plain sight, on housing estates, etc where there were other vehicles around us. People don't tend to 'see' you when you do this.

After we gave up motor caravanning I bought a  7 seater car to sleep in, I used it a few times (with the back seats down the sleeping area was the size of a double bed) but not as much as I thought I would. I always slept in 'plain sight' but because of the windows, (I didn't want people looking in on me, especially Police, they are not the sort of people I want to meet in the dark) I organised a few pieces of pre-measured string with loops at each end across the top of my sleeping area and just threw an old dark blanket over them. The blanket was about one foot above my body, so when people walked by and looked in they just saw a dark flat area, they certainly didn't see me. The only time they might have noticed me was if I turned over and the body of the car moved. That car has been sold so I'm now back to basic wild camping, tent or bivvy, whenever possible or whenever it takes my fancy.

For me 'wild camping' is also trying (when coming out of a pub) to only walk a very short distance before settling to sleep, cricket and football grounds can very useful 'hotels' for the night.

[watershed]

I'm sad, but not at all amazed, that you seem to think there's something wrong with people who don't share your preferences. People walk for many different reasons and enjoy many different aspects of this leisure activity. For me, fitness, health and exercise top the list of reasons I walk, with more aesthetic reasons very close behind. Sleeping rough doesn't come into for me. 

Dave is correct people walk for many different reasons.
I walk for the adventure, the exploration of both the countryside and me.
My previous hobby of running and now walking, are on reflection, both about living the adventure and discovering the spiritual.
When running I enjoyed most the running free over the hills away from any roads and trails. Track and roads were used solely for race preparation, I got little enjoyment out of it, they were a necessary evil.
I have found that with the road walking during this restrictive period, it is a necessary evil, I have used it to try and maintain fitness, in preparation for future explorations and adventures.
Dave says Fitness, health and exercise top his list.
They do not come into my top three.
I would still go out for a walking adventure, even if it proved to be bad for me.
Wild camping, I have discovered, hugely opens the opportunities to explore further both the physical and the mental adventures that I am seeking. It removes the severe limitations caused by restricting my walk to areas where accommodation is readily at hand.
I was born in 1960 It must be that I have discovered my inner Hippy😉

[richardh1905]

For me fitness, health and exercise are a beneficial side effect of walking, rather than a primary motivation. I could also add mental wellbeing as another equally important side effect.

[gunwharfman]

I must admit that knowing that I have always had a really comfortable adult life, nicely wrapped up in the cotton wool of a real job, a career, good pay, paid holidays, employment security and so on, perhaps like 'watershed' and because I know that I have been 'safe and secure' for decades, the idea of an 'adventure' where one's inner self is tested is often I think, worth its weight in gold! Having tried to contribute to the 'How much wealth do you need' subject 'wild camping' can be just the boost that one might need in life to come 'out' of what we might judge to be the artificiality of the way we live today even just for a day or two? I know that with loads of money I could buy all of the 'adventures' that is available in the 'market place' of our capitalist way of life, but the opportunity to experience 'real or raw life' that 'wild camping' offers could be judged by some (like me) to be priceless experience and something to look back on with pleasure and pride.

[barewirewalker]

I could buy all of the 'adventures' that is available in the 'market place' of our capitalist way of life, but the opportunity to experience 'real or raw life' that 'wild camping' offers could be judged by some (like me) to be priceless experience and something to look back on with pleasure and pride.

But surely those adventures that could be bought are just other people trying to earn a living. The countryside is a resource, it is a part of a capital asset that is land, but the owner of land only really needs soil to cultivate, some soil is unoccupied, seasonally unused or set aside, the leisure use of the countryside may provide many other tiers of wealth creation. Wild camping is just one of those tiers. If you are really looking to see capitalism at work in the countryside, start at the escalation of agricultural land value. How can a farmer borrow enough money to buy land at over £10,000 an acre, yet in no other enterprise would that outlay be realistic given the returns. Enterprises based on agriculture have tax protection, who benefits, who puts money into land investments, yet the social benefits that must come from the countryside element of land is penalized by limited access.

Wild camping is just an expression of part the way the countryside can play in sharing the countryside. 

[beefy]

I have a Sherpa called beefy who carries it 

I may move to Scotland if you are allowed to go wild camping at the moment 

I am pleased you got out and enjoyed it 

 

Pleb, are you thinking of giving wild camping a go?  I'm sure beefy could lend you a bit of basic gear     

Come on pleb heres a challenge for ya
You can wild camp with us if you want to try it,
 

[Percy]

Well the topic's done well to last a couple of pages before going off topic 

This is a walking forum so you could argue that the entire thread is off topic, particularly given one of the hissy fits we’ve had recently.

[WhitstableDave]

For me fitness, health and exercise are a beneficial side effect of walking, rather than a primary motivation. I could also add mental wellbeing as a
nother equally important side effect.

I did say that, "For me, fitness, health and exercise top the list of reasons I walk, with more aesthetic reasons very close behind" and my aesthetic reasons are what we tend to hear most about on this forum; I love wonderful views, wildflowers, solitude, fresh air, walking in the rain, and so on, as much as anyone.

I enjoyed walking long before I started thinking of myself as a walker. For example, when my wife drove 7 miles to Canterbury to get her hair or nails done on a Saturday morning, I'd walk there on country paths to meet her afterwards - just for the shear enjoyment of walking.

I suppose I put fitness, health and exercise first on my list because, since the lockdown, I've been perfectly content to use a treadmill to carry on walking. I still have targets and challenges and I feel great - if fact, I've been averaging around 100 miles a week since the beginning of April.

We all have our own reasons why we enjoy walking as a leisure activity. My tastes are extremely varied: I love solitude and adventure, but I also enjoy exploring towns and urban areas. I love rough tracks and places with no tracks, but I'm just as happy to spend a day on tarmac. I love remote hills and mountains, but no more than I love coastal paths, woodland, farmland, orchards or marshes. And I'm happy to ramble with my wife and family, but I also like to set new PBs for speeds and distances on my own. I like walking on sunny days, but I really enjoy walking in mist, rain and (too rarely) snow and I've never once not gone walking because of the weather. Actually, I can't think of any kind of walking I've done that I don't like... (although I've never tried a Ramblers outing!). 

[barewirewalker]

The title of the topic asks a question, yet the motives that drive different types of walker to wild camping are varied. I asked a question about terminology. Does that qualify as going off topic, to some it seems the idea of wild camping is setting up a campsite in a remote place so that they can explore the surrounding area whereas the other is a discreet overnight camp, that is part of a route allowing minimal interruption between dawn and dusk on a multiday route?


So to discuss further parameters into the problems surrounding issues, are we flagrantly hijacking Pleb's topic or is the 4th page a testimony that he has done a rare thing on this forum and raised a subject pertinent to our interest and got some opinions? At 77 years of age and having nursed a dodgy back since my late 20's my practical wild camping is probably over, but the theory of it in relation to routes is an interest that still fascinates me.

Pleb's 2nd and last post so far suggests a disinterest in the practical aspects, but I applaud his choice of topic. Was his choice of topic at the moment triggered by current press coverage? This should also be relevant because how we behave will influence how our children and their children are free to do as we did. I was 14 when I first took of to Snowdonia free of parental supervision and manage to do the complete Snowden Horseshoe from a wild camp at the end of the Capel Curig lake. A wild camp by today's standard.

If we can focus the good side of wild camping, or perhaps it should be DONC, discreet overnight camps, then perhaps our young teenagers might be able to travel longer distances in school holidays, without having to be supervised because the only places that they might be allowed have too much risk.


Day before yesterday Mrs BWW did our first walk since lock that was away from home, it was a little known beauty spot in Shropshire that really should be part of a route across Shropshire and was probably on the line of a Medieval cattle drove from mid Wales to London, because the Wrekin would have been the marker to guide to a crossing of the River Severn. I could not help noticing a multitude of spots to DONC, yet I felt sad that with today's attitudes about property that our children or grandchildren would be fearful of taking that risk and if they did would almost certainly been moved on without any understanding of where they should spend the night.

Yet it in our history, of which that Medieval route is part, there are fragments of law that still record the traditions that allowed our forefathers this freedom.

[BuzyG]

We all have our own reasons why we enjoy walking as a leisure activity. My tastes are extremely varied: I love solitude and adventure, but I also enjoy exploring towns and urban areas. I love rough tracks and places with no tracks, but I'm just as happy to spend a day on tarmac. I love remote hills and mountains, but no more than I love coastal paths, woodland, farmland, orchards or marshes. And I'm happy to ramble with my wife and family, but I also like to set new PBs for speeds and distances on my own. I like walking on sunny days, but I really enjoy walking in mist, rain and (too rarely) snow and I've never once not gone walking because of the weather. Actually, I can't think of any kind of walking I've done that I don't like... (although I've never tried a Ramblers outing!). 

You should give a few Ramblers groups a go Dave. Be warned they are not all equal though.  So don't turn and run if the first group do not suit your physical or social requirements.

[ninthace]

From about the ages of eight to eighteen, I spent nearly every weekend from early spring to late autumn in a tent in some farmer's field with my parents and their friends camped nearby.  I started off in a small pup tent with wooden poles, no flysheet and a tarp groundsheet, with the grass coming up inside the tent.  In time I moved on to a tent with zips, a sewn in groundsheet, metal poles and best of all a fly sheet so I stopped getting wet every time it rained.  Most of the time I shared my space with my dog which was fine until he had an itch.  No one sleeping on an airbed sleeps through a dog leaning on you while it has a good scratch.  I have really good memories, as a teenager, of getting organised with the other kids and camping in a corner of the field, away from the grown ups, cooking and generally looking after ourselves.
When I got married, our first holidays were under canvass using the tent from my youth and later my parents' old tent.  When the kids came along, we carried on for a while, they shared my old tent and we bought a larger version for ourselves.  For a while, the urge to camp wore off and my only "camping" was the odd expedition or bit of survival training provided by HRH.  Then the camping urge had one last fling after the kids left for college.  We bought a motor camper with the intention of eventually disappearing into Europe on an extended road trip.  That never happened, though it got close.


Sometimes the urge to wild camp returns, but now it would be a solo activity - Mrs N has made that clear.  The thought of a quiet night out on the moors or in the hills has its appeal but the thought of spending a small fortune on what will, at best, be a fairly intermittent, lonely and possibly uncomfortable activity still does not have sufficient appeal.  I think maybe over the years I am all camped out and still like my creature comforts too much.

[WILDWALKINGUK]

Hi all.


It just goes to show everyone is different.


I've been wild camping for nearly 50 years. It's the feeling of freedom. Walking as far as I like each day without a definite plan and camping where ever I get to. The chance to change the route depending on the weather conditions or how I feel that day and not having to follow a predesignated route and make it to the booked accommodation etc. 
Wild camping also makes it possible for me to get out into the countryside more, because I've a low income. I wouldn't have been able to walk Lands End to John O'Groats last year if I had had to pay the usual £3500 for accommodation etc. I walked and wild camped it for £1300 and most of that was spent enjoying the company of locals in their pubs and cafes.

[SteamyTea]

I wouldn't have been able to walk Lands End to John O'Groats last year if I had had to pay the usual £3500 for accommodation etc. I walked and wild camped it for £1300 and most of that was spent enjoying the company of locals in their pubs and cafes.

Would you have considered using campsites if they are just a few quid for a person walking and staying only 1 or 2 nights.
Thinking under a tenner a night.
Last times I used a campsite I think it was 20 quid, and that was back in 2007.

[WILDWALKINGUK]

I used to use campsites and would still if they were cheaper. Can't beat a hot shower at the end of the day. But can't justify it now my income doesn't seem to have kept up with modern life. Unfortunately I can still remember paying 2 or £3 a night.
The higher prices do mean that the facilities are much better on campsites now, the first time I walked the Pennine Way I can remember using the facilities on one campsite, which were a bucket in the corner of his tractor shed. So it's not all bad now.
Things would be much better if my memory wasn't so good.  

[ninthace]

I used to use campsites and would still if they were cheaper. Can't beat a hot shower at the end of the day. But can't justify it now my income doesn't seem to have kept up with modern life. Unfortunately I can still remember paying 2 or £3 a night.
The higher prices do mean that the facilities are much better on campsites now, the first time I walked the Pennine Way I can remember using the facilities on one campsite, which were a bucket in the corner of his tractor shed. So it's not all bad now.
Things would be much better if my memory wasn't so good. 

  I spent time camping in Cornwall where the loo was half a dozen Elsans in a big tent which was both educational and friendly.  When the cans were full, the contents were poured down an old mine shaft.