Pitching, sleeping and leaving: the craft of a wild camp

The instinct is to look for flat. Flat is necessary and it is nowhere near sufficient, because the flattest ground in a valley is flat for a reason and the reason is usually water. Look instead for slightly convex ground — a low rise, a shoulder, the shallow crown of a shelf — which sheds rain rather than collecting it.

• Not the valley floor, and not the summit — Cold air sinks and pools, so the bottom of a valley is reliably several degrees colder than the slope above it and far more likely to be in cloud by morning. The top is exposed to everything. The band between the two is where you want to be, and on a hill that usually means camping lower than the view tempts you to.
• Read the vegetation before you trust the ground — Rushes, sphagnum and bright green grass mean water, whatever the surface feels like underfoot at eight in the evening. Heather and bilberry mean drainage. A patch of short-cropped grass in rough ground is usually where sheep lie up, which means it is dry — and also means you are taking their spot.
• Look up — Standing dead wood, loose rock above, a cornice, an obviously undercut bank. None of these are likely to fall on the one night you are there and all of them make a very bad story.
• Water nearby, not next to you — You want to be able to fetch water without a long walk and not to be camped on the bank. Streams rise, midges concentrate at the water’s edge, and running water masks the sound of anything else.
• Out of sight is the whole social contract — A tent visible from a road, a track, a farm or a summit path is a tent somebody has an opinion about. Pitching where you cannot be seen is what makes the practice tolerated, and it costs nothing but a few minutes of walking.

1. 1

   Step 1: Work out where the wind is coming from, then commit

   Not where it is blowing at that moment near a wall, but the prevailing direction on the slope. Pitch the narrowest, lowest end into it. A tent that is broadside to the wind at three in the morning will not fail catastrophically but it will be loud, and nobody sleeps through a flapping flysheet.

2. 2

   Step 2: Clear the footprint properly

   Sixty seconds on hands and knees removing stones, cones and the one twig you will otherwise feel all night. Do this before the tent goes down, not after you have found the twig.

3. 3

   Step 3: Get the base square and pegged before you raise anything

   A tent pitched taut from a distorted base cannot be fixed by tightening guys — you are just pulling the distortion tighter. Peg the corners to the shape they are meant to be first.

4. 4

   Step 4: Peg at forty-five degrees, into the ground rather than along it

   The peg should oppose the direction of pull. In soft ground use rocks on top; in thin ground over rock, a flat stone laid on the peg beats a peg that will not go in.

5. 5

   Step 5: Tension in opposite pairs, and leave the doors until last

   Tightening one side at a time drags the whole tent sideways. Work across. Then check the door zips run smoothly — if a zip is fighting, the panel is under uneven tension and it will only get worse overnight.

6. 6

   Step 6: Vent it, even in the cold

   Especially in the cold. Which is the next section, and it is the thing most first-timers get exactly backwards.

The commonest cold night is not a sleeping bag problem. Compressed down or synthetic fill underneath you has almost no insulating value, so the ground draws heat out of your back all night regardless of what the bag is rated to. That is what a mat is for, and it is why mats are rated separately.

• Match the mat to the ground, not the air — Frozen or wet ground pulls heat far faster than cold air does. If you are cold from below, a warmer bag will not fix it and a better mat will.
• Eat something before you sleep — You are running the heater. Going to bed hungry after a long day is a reliable way to wake at two.
• Dry base layer, and only that — Sleeping in the clothes you walked in puts damp next to your skin all night. A dedicated dry base layer that never leaves the bag is one of the highest-value items in the pack.
• Deal with the small things before you are cold — Hat on, hood adjusted, drink taken, bladder emptied. Every one of these is easy at ten and miserable at three, and the last one keeps people awake more than any of the others.

• Cook outside the tent, and away from where you sleep — A stove inside a flysheet is a fire and a carbon monoxide risk in one, and the smell brings animals to your porch. Cook a short distance away, on stone or bare ground rather than on vegetation — a stove will scorch a circle of turf that takes a season to recover.
• Wash up away from the water, and scatter — Food waste and detergent go nowhere near the stream. Strain what is left, carry the solids out, and scatter the water widely on ground rather than tipping it in one place.
• Human waste: far from water, buried, paper out — At least thirty metres from any watercourse, path or pitch. A hole deep enough to be a hole rather than a scrape. Paper and wipes come home with you — buried paper resurfaces, and wipes never break down at all.
• Pack out everything, including the things that look natural — Orange peel, apple cores and teabags do not belong on a hill and do not disappear in the timescale people assume. If you carried it up, it comes down.
• Leave early, and check the pitch on your knees — The convention is arrive late, leave early — which is also the practical answer, because early is when the ground is driest to walk off. Before you go, kneel where the tent was and look. Peg holes trodden closed, flattened grass lifted with your fingers, stove scorch checked for, and one slow scan for the tent peg you are about to leave behind.

None of this is fussiness. Wild camping in most of England and Wales is tolerated rather than permitted, and in Scotland it is a right conditional on behaving responsibly. The difference between those two positions and a blanket ban is, in practice, a decade of people either doing the above or not.