July 2021

What exactly is “wild camping”? Let us consider the following two scenarios…

1. It is the year 1960. The population of the UK is around 52 million. Two students take the train to the Highlands of Scotland and go on a walking holiday. They climb up a mountain, meeting only a forester, two other hikers and a deer, and pitch the small tents they are carrying on their backs in a forest glade. They cook their supper over a small fire in a ring of stones. They get their water from a mountain stream, which at this date is still unpolluted. The next morning they bury their organic waste (apple cores and human faeces) in a hole. Nobody visits that glade for another three months so there is plenty of time for it to biodegrade. They take their other rubbish with them when they move on. This is the sort of camping which I myself did as a young woman, sleeping under the stars on a hillside in the wilds of Greece at the time when you could do so without meeting anything except a few sheep and an occasional shepherd.

2. It is the year 2021. The population of the UK is around 68 million. A ferry docks at a small Scottish island and ten large camper vans drive off it, carrying in most cases a single elderly retired couple. We will follow one of them. They drive along the two-lane road in a convoy mixed with tractors and supermarket delivery lorries, emitting diesel fumes as they admire the lichen growing in the unpolluted air. Every time they meet a hill, the convoy is slowed by cyclists with loaded panniers and scarlet faces struggling up the slope. It takes time for the line of vehicles to overtake them, because of the hills, bends, and lack of a fast lane.

The camper van couple eat their lunch in the parking space at a local beauty spot, along with two other camper vans, thus taking up all of the six spaces intended for cars. They do not seem to realise that their vans may not have a logo painted on the side but they are exactly the same size and shape as a delivery van and detract just as much as commercial traffic from the beauty of the view. That night, they park their van in a layby in full view of several houses. Although the population density of the island is low in comparison to a large city, there are no places nowadays that you can reach in a motor vehicle which are not overlooked by one or two houses. They dispose of their rubbish in the roadside bin, to be dealt with by the local council at the tax-payer’s expense.

There is nothing wild about the camping in the second scenario. What is romantic about spending the night at the edge of a road and sharing your view of the sea or the woodland with all the local home owners and anyone driving down that road to get to work? What we are talking about here is free camping.

In the past, people in much of Scotland earned their living farming, game-keeping or foresting. Those occupations are more or less obsolete except for a very small number of people. The tourist trade has stepped in to fill the vacuum, and local authorities do everything they can to attract tourists to their area to provide employment. You can hardly blame them. But the exercise is self-defeating, if the product you are advertising is the opportunity to Be at One with Nature. By attracting ever-growing numbers of people from the big cities, themselves now massively over-populated, you destroy the silence, the peace, and the solitude which many of your visitors seek. There is no longer any nature to be at one with. There is no ‘wild’.