Up close and personal with the great outdoors
Some readers may be persuaded to try it for themselves — and not glamping (glamour camping) but camping.
It’s a great way, at low cost, to get up close and personal with the outdoors. In a tent, only a thin sheet of canvas separates one from nature, natural light, sounds and smells.
Meanwhile, hot showers and bathrooms are standard on camp site and with a car one can tote blow-up mattresses and duvets.
Simple tents cost a quarter of what they did before and, these days, are waterproof. When a shower passed over on the second night, the bluster of wind on the canvas and the patter of rain drops above brought not discomfort but, rather, a sense of nostalgia to us dwellers-under-slates-and-concrete, cut off from the natural world.
And how exhilarating it was to step out into the night of an open field in Buckinghamshire with a three-quarters moon lighting the worn, chalk-white trails of the oldest trackway in Britain, the Icknield Way, on the Chiltern ridge above me, and to hear the silence and to smell the dew on the grass.
The grand occasion was the annual family reunion. This year, what with the weather, the vote was for an open-air, rather than domestic, experience. On the Friday, 23 family members had arrived on the site by 6pm.
My wife and I had crossed by ferry via Holyhead, taking the car so as to transport some family back to Ireland to continue holidaying here. We pitched our tents in a rough circle, grouped around a fire-bowl where the bonfire would be lit, with cars parked on the outer perimeter. The farmer-owner of the site favoured us with a fine piece of ground. Other tents were pitched a good distance away; we were a veritable tent village and a tribe unto ourselves.
As the evening began, the sun broke through and painted the sky red, no doubt to the delight of shepherds — fat sheep and, also, Belted Galloway cattle, black with a broad white belt, graze the Chiltern hills.
It shone down upon the assembled Enrights and their kindred gathered in that foreign field, hitherto forever England but now under Irish occupation for the weekend.
Laid out below us were views of vast acres of wheat stubble, golden in the evening light, and beyond them a ridge of hills rising to Ivinghoe Beacon, steeped in history. In the distance, an industrious farmer with tractor continued baling straw until near darkness.
At sunset, the fire-bowl bonfire was lit. Dinner, following upon a table of hors d’oeuvres that would have challenged the best restaurant (cheeses Irish, English and French, soda bread home-baked in Ireland), arrived in a huge pot of homemade chili con carne and a cauldron of rice.
After dinner, stalwart sons and grandsons, husbands and partners-in-law fed the flames with logs bought from the farmer. All sat around and, in natural flow from chair to chair, everybody got to sit with everybody to exchange news of the year since we had last met.
Happily, the farmer had dictated that radios were not allowed on site. Sometimes, we heard the low murmur of distant campers, communing around their fires. Meanwhile, we had the heart-plucking background chords of a Spanish guitar quietly played by one of the sons or ballad airs strummed gently by grandsons and in-laws. Happily, nobody sang and so there was no need to suspend conversation.
In the morning, as the breakfast sizzled over the fire-bowl, a red kite came skimming over the nearest stubble field, quartering it back and forth, a big, graceful bird with upturned wing-tips and forked tail.
Then, the walk; the tribe strung out in ragged Indian file along the field paths, all chatter and colour, heading for the Icknield Way, the ridge-top wildflower meadows, the vast views from Ivinghoe.
We decamped on the Sunday, packing up and heading for our various homes. The 500-mile drive back to west Cork was easy going and — as we used to say at the end of school essays — we arrived home “tired but happy”, after a joyous and enlightening weekend.
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