Wild camping

For the views that money really can't buy and entire hillsides to yourself, you can't beat the thrill of wild camping, says Guy Procter.

The ups and downs of nights on the hill

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... When Dickens wrote those famous words he was talking about London and Paris in the time of the French Revolution. But he could just as easily have been talking about my experiences of wild camping in the Lakes and Peaks.

Sleeping in a tent high above the intake wall has brought me closer to the bosom of the hills than I’ve ever felt before, thrilled me with skies aflame and great gulfs of solitude, and yet it’s also something that has sent me running into the arms of civilisation – to warm towels and chips and telly – with almost as much ecstatic gratitude.

Wild camping is no more guaranteed an emotional poster-moment than a family holiday at Center Parcs is certain to be anything like as peaceable as the advert. But the thing is, with wild camping you can afford to try, try and try again. And the more you do it the more you file off the little burrs in your preparations (nappy sacks are handy, ziplock bags better, a camping pillow is worth it and no amount of time spent getting rid of stones from where you’ve pitched your tent would have been wasted), and the more likely it is the weather and your dreams of ‘ What This Should Be Like’ will coincide and really, properly thrill you. And they will.

Wherever you choose it’s definitely a superior room with a better view than the swankiest hotel; you will be up and out when the hills have been emptied of other folk and ordinary light (dusk and dawn are landscape photographers’ moneymakers); there is something magical that happens to food served on an aluminium spoon in the open air; and conversation is better uttered softly under canvas. Roll those dice just a few times and the sixes will come – and the more you play, the better your luck.

For every experience like the one I had on the West Highland Way outside Kinlochleven – when I pitched my tent in the pouring rain, climbed into my sagging down sleeping bag and fell asleep too demoralised even to cook – there will be three that perpetually glow in your recollection. Like the time the sundown turned the mist at the summit of Helvellyn blood red; or when I looked down from Kinder downfall and the lights of Stockport looked like the raked-

out embers of a fire; or the time we cooked the sweetest bacon I’ve ever tasted against the backdrop of Suilven gilded with late afternoon light.

Wild camping deserves the name. It’s walking’s Big Game hunt, and you should approach with the patience of an Attenborough film-maker – hard to capture and liable to involve some hardship, your wild camping quarry is liable to produce some spellbinding scenes for the plasma screen of your memory.