I’ve been meaning to get into updating my blog more often (again), and I thought this would be a good update.

I went wild camping a couple of times in June, both times in Scotland. The first place we went to was near Ben Lomond, and although the location was great (very rural, yet shops/local village only 8 miles away), it was a four and a half hour drive to get there from Newcastle. We left on the Friday night after work and arrived at bout 8:30PM, and spent about half an hour finding a good spot to camp. We had to find a spot that would accommodate everyone (7 people, 5 tents), which was harder that we expected due to the density of the trees in the forest area.

After setting up the tents we made a fire using fall wood from around the area.

On the Saturday morning it had been raining quite heavily, so we set up a couple of tarps over the campfire area and made plans to drive to the base of Ben Lomond and have a go at climbing it. We got to Ben Lomond at about 12 and set straight off and after about an hour we’d ascended about half way up, but the wind and hail had become so strong that we decided it was too dangerous to carry on (along with quite a few of us being tired out already).

We reached the bottom of mountain within about 30 minutes, and drove back to get dinner at a pub located in the village near camp. We ended up buying a couple of bags of logs from a garage because it had been raining heavily all day, so that we could get the fire going easily and not have to mess around collecting damp wood in the rain (everyone was soaked from being out in it all day already).

The second wild camp we did was a bit closer, and took about two and a half hours to drive there (It was near St Mary’s Loch). We were planning on having a go at making a basic shelter out of fall wood, but we ended up not really having time to do this. It took a while to find a spot to camp, but we managed to find a place next to a fallen tree which gave us plenty of wood to chop up for the fire. We used a “hand chain saw” for cutting up the tree, which works surprisingly well when you get a good rhythm going between the two of you. Once the fire was going we used a tinfoil turkey tray from the pound shop for cooking sausages and skewers on.