Wild camping

Wild camping means pitching for a night in open country rather than at a site — no facilities, no booking, no neighbours, and nothing left behind in the morning. In practice it is usually an adjunct to walking: it turns a day route into a two-day one, puts you on a summit at sunrise, and removes the drive home from the end of a long day.

It is worth separating from two things it is confused with. Campsite camping is a different activity with the same equipment and almost none of the same considerations. Bivvying — sleeping in a waterproof bag with no tent — is a distinct discipline with a much smaller pack, a much better view and a considerably worse night in rain. The middle ground, a tarp, has enthusiasts who will explain at length that it is the best of both.

What people are usually surprised by is how much of the skill is site selection rather than equipment. A sheltered, level, well-drained pitch with water nearby makes an ordinary tent comfortable; an exposed, sloping, boggy one makes an expensive tent miserable. That judgement takes a few nights to acquire and no amount of reading substitutes for it.

Where it is a statutory right

Scotland, under access legislation

Where it is a right in England

Dartmoor commons, and there aloneConfirmed by the Supreme Court in May 2025.

The purchase that matters most

The sleeping matThe ground takes more heat out of you than the air does.

What decides the night

Where you pitch, not what you pitch

• One night, close to the car, in summer — The whole activity in miniature, and enough to tell you whether you like it.
• A two-day route with a camp in the middle — Where wild camping stops being an end in itself and becomes the thing that makes a route possible.
• Multi-day, with resupply — Long-distance walking with the accommodation problem solved. Food planning becomes the constraint rather than fitness.
• Shoulder-season and winter — A different activity in the same clothes. Longer nights, a much larger equipment requirement, and consequences that scale accordingly.
• Bothies and bivvies — Sideways moves rather than upward ones — less equipment, more exposure, and for a lot of people the version they end up preferring.

1. 1

   Step 1: Pick somewhere with an escape route

   A first pitch within an hour of a car, in settled summer weather, on ground you have walked before. The point of the first night is to find out what your equipment does, not to have an adventure.

   You will know it worked when: A bad night ends in the car rather than at three in the morning on a hill.

2. 2

   Step 2: Sleep in the tent in a garden first

   Genuinely. You will discover the missing peg, the mat that deflates and the bag that is colder than advertised somewhere it does not matter.

   You will know it worked when: The equipment failures happen at home.

3. 3

   Step 3: Check the forecast, and then the mountain forecast

   The general forecast is for the valley. Wind speed at height is the number that decides whether a pitch is survivable, and it is routinely double what the lowland figure suggests.

   You will know it worked when: You know what the night will actually be.

4. 4

   Step 4: Walk in with time to choose a pitch in daylight

   Level, drained, sheltered from the prevailing wind, near water, away from the path. Finding all five in the dark is much harder, and the compromise you accept at dusk is one you sleep on all night.

   You will know it worked when: A good pitch rather than the first flat thing.

5. 5

   Step 5: Tell somebody where you are going and when you are back

   Route, pitch area, expected return. In Britain this is the single most useful safety measure available and it costs one message.

   You will know it worked when: Somebody knows where to start looking.

6. 6

   Step 6: Get up and go

   Pack at first light, check the ground for anything dropped, and leave nothing at all. The pitch should not be identifiable an hour later.

   You will know it worked when: The access other people rely on survives your visit.

• Sleeping mat — First, and it surprises everybody. Conduction into the ground removes far more heat than the air does, and a warm bag on a thin mat will still be a cold night. Mats carry an R-value; higher is warmer, and anything below about 3 is a summer mat.
• Sleeping bag — Rated for the season you will actually use, not the season you aspire to. Down is lighter and warmer for its weight and useless when wet; synthetic is heavier and forgiving. Ratings are optimistic, and the "comfort" figure is the honest one rather than the "limit".
• Tent — Wind resistance matters more than waterproofing in British hills — everything sold is waterproof and not everything sold stays up. A freestanding or semi-freestanding design pitches on ground where pegs will not hold.
• Stove and pot — Gas is simplest and loses performance in cold. A meal and a hot drink at the end of a wet day is worth more than its weight, and the psychological effect is not a small thing.
• Water and a means of treating it — Hill water is usually fine and is not guaranteed to be. A filter or tablets weigh almost nothing. Check upstream for livestock, and prefer moving water to standing.
• Head torch, plus a spare light — Pitching in the dark is normal. Doing it while holding a phone is not.
• Warm layer that is not your walking layer — You stop moving, you get cold, and the layer you walked in is damp. A dry insulated jacket kept in the pack is the difference between an evening and an endurance.
• Map and compass, and the ability to use them — A phone is an excellent navigation tool and a poor sole one — cold flattens batteries fast, and it is a single point of failure in the one situation where you need it.

Weight compounds in a way that is easy to underestimate. Ten kilograms is a pleasant walk in; fifteen is work; twenty turns a good route into an endurance event and is how people conclude they dislike an activity they would enjoy. The usual advice is to weigh everything once and be honest about what earned its place, and the usual result is that the savings come from the things you brought in case rather than from buying lighter versions of the things you use.

Britain has three different answers to this question and they are genuinely different, not variations in enforcement. Almost every article that says "wild camping is technically illegal but nobody minds" is describing one of the three and generalising it to the others.

What "responsibly" means in practice, everywhere, and what the Countryside Code asks:

• Arrive late, leave early — Pitch at dusk and be gone soon after dawn. A tent that is up all afternoon is a camp rather than a night out, and it is what generates complaints and byelaws.
• Small groups, small tents — One or two tents. A group of eight is a different proposition and is where tolerance ends.
• Well away from buildings and roads — Out of sight of houses and off the enclosed farmland. High ground and open country, not a field with a gate.
• No fires — Fire damages the ground for years and on peat can burn underground for weeks. Use a stove, and be careful with it in dry conditions.
• Take everything out — Everything, including food waste, which does not decompose usefully on a hillside and does attract animals.
• Toilet properly — Well away from water and paths, buried, and paper carried out. This is the single commonest failure and the one most likely to lose access for everybody.
• If asked to move, move — Politely and immediately. Almost every access restriction in Britain exists because enough people did not.

The other things that go wrong, in rough order of how often:

• The wind gets up — Wind, not rain, is what destroys tents and nights in Britain. A pitch that is fine at nine is untenable at two, and the judgement to make is whether to re-pitch lower or to walk out — both at night, both unpleasant, and the second is often correct.
• Water where you pitched — Flat ground in hills is usually flat because water collects there. A dry hollow in the evening is a puddle after four hours of rain.
• The phone is dead — Cold drains batteries far faster than expected. Keep it warm, carry a battery pack, and do not let it be the only map or the only torch.
• Livestock and dogs — Cattle are the genuine hazard in British open country, particularly with a dog present. Give them room, and let a dog off the lead rather than being pulled through a herd.
• Ticks — Widespread in bracken and long grass, and worth a check morning and evening. Remove promptly with a proper tool rather than fingers.
• Getting the forecast wrong by a day — The commonest planning failure. Settled weather that arrives on Sunday is no use to a Saturday night, and the willingness to postpone is the most underrated skill in the activity.

The access position in Britain is unusually contingent, and the etiquette exists because of that rather than out of politeness. In England and Wales most wild camping happens on a tolerance rather than a right, and a tolerance is withdrawn when it is abused. In Scotland the right is statutory, and the seasonal byelaws that now cover some popular areas are a direct response to what happened when large numbers of people arrived and behaved badly. The pattern is the same in both: the reason a rule exists is almost always a specific place where the informal version stopped working.

That is worth stating plainly because it changes what the advice is for. "Arrive late, leave early, take everything out" is not a code of personal virtue — it is the maintenance cost of an arrangement that the next person also depends on. The photograph of a tent pitched at midday beside a loch, with a fire, is doing measurable damage to something the person taking it wants to keep.

The counterpart is that the culture is unusually welcoming to newcomers who ask. Access campaigning organisations, mountaineering councils and the online communities are all consistently generous about where is reasonable, what the local position is, and what a first night should look like — considerably more so than the equipment forums are about equipment.