Sophie’s Guide to Wild Camping in the UK

Updated: March 2023

As a seasoned wild camper of five years, I’ve introduced numerous friends to the activity and experienced firsthand the benefits of getting close to nature. Wild camping offers a chance to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life, either to enjoy peace and relaxation, or embark on an adventure, depending on your framing! Even better, this escapism can fit around your everyday life; on several occasions, I’ve headed out to wild camp after work and been back in time to start work again the next morning. Plus, compared to the escapism of heading to the cinema, or even to your local campsite, it’s completely free. In this guide to wild camping in the UK, I’ll try to demystify the big questions so you can confidently give it a go yourself this summer.

What is Wild Camping?

First, let’s establish exactly what we mean by wild camping. Wild camping involves spending a night sleeping in the great outdoors away from civilization, typically in a tent or bivy bag, rather than on a campsite. To ensure the protection of the environment, successful wild camping follows the “Leave No Trace” principle, which includes:

• Taking away all your litter and not removing anything else from the environment (e.g. rocks or flowers). You may hear this summarised rather cheesily as “taking only pictures and leaving only memories”.
• Not starting campfires directly on the ground
• Using a trowel to dig a hole for any human waste
• Some influencers believe that the “Leave No Trace” principle includes not geotagging photos on social media to prevent overcrowding in hidden or vulnerable areas. This is quite often used as an excuse for gatekeeping though, which I disagree with. I’m personally happy to give camping spot recommendations to anyone who reaches out to me with good intentions!

Wild camping is illegal in most of the UK, aside from Scotland. Until very recently there was an exception in Dartmoor National Park, but this has been the subject of an ongoing battle after a court case resulted in the loss of the right to wild camp in the area. 

However, don’t take this to mean that you can’t wild camp in England or Wales. Despite being technically illegal, in many places wild camping is tolerated when campers are respectful, especially in national parks. It’s a good idea to follow some additional guidelines that keep locals happy:

• Never wild camp within 100m of roads or housing
• Avoid private land. Most national parks have moorland, hills or mountains where you can camp rather than using farmers’ fields!
• Minimise the time for which your tent is pitched during daylight hours
• Camp in small groups and keep the noise down

To reassure you, I can pretty confidently say you will never, ever get in serious trouble on the rare occasion someone does take issue with your wild camping. Most likely they will ask you to move, and as long as you politely oblige, the problem ends there! This has never happened to me by the way, and the one time I was interrupted by police while preparing to sleep in a car they simply verified that I wasn’t drinking alcohol and wished me a good night’s sleep.

How to find wild camping spots

So, this leads us to the most important question: how do you find a good wild camping spot? If you’re not sure how to answer this, it may be one of the main obstacles to getting started. In all honesty, I still find it difficult, despite having wild camped on many occasions now. The main criteria I have for a wild camping spot are: that it’s somewhere remote I’m unlikely to encounter people; there’s somewhere nearby I can safely leave my car; and probably most importantly, it’s somewhere I’d actually like to spend a night (i.e. there is a nice view 🙂). From multiple personal experiences, I highly recommend not camping on a mountain-top unless the wind forecast is LOW, even in the height of summer!!

I would suggest the following steps:

1. Idea Generation: First, try to generate a bunch of reasonable-sounding locations. If you’re new to wild camping and nervous about being asked to move on, I’d highly recommend sticking to national parks or other areas with a low density of roads and towns, such as AONBs. The two main ways I come up with ideas are by looking out for spots on day hikes, or perusing Facebook groups like Wild Camping UK (people rarely post their exact location, but you can look for clues or places you recognise – and sometimes they do post their exact location!)
2. Detective Work: For any location you think could be a potentially good wild camping spot, it helps to do a bit of detective work. If this is a spot you came up with yourself, you can try searching for it in the aforementioned Facebook groups to see if anyone else has camped there. You can also try zooming in on the exact spot on Google maps in satellite mode, to get an idea of what it looks like and whether there’s anything nearby. Finally, you can use Park4night to get information on the place you plan to leave your car. People use this mobile app to share information about parking spots for overnight stays, whether they plan to sleep in the car or to camp nearby. They will normally mention in the reviews whether there are “no camping” or “no overnight parking” signs, or whether there are nosy locals.
3. Selection: Pick something, and pick a backup which isn’t too much further to drive!

What to bring and how to prepare

Finally it’s happening. You’ve chosen your wild camping spot, and you’re ready to go! So what else do you need to prepare before you head out?

There are quite a few obvious things here: you need to bring a tent, a sleeping bag, and a roll mat for example. Picking good kit is probably an entire blog post on its own, so I will refrain from commenting on these essential items. However, let me offer some pearls of wisdom regarding things you may or may not have thought of:

• A head torch is so much more convenient than a phone torch, trust me
• Speaking of your phone, do bring a battery pack
• It might get cold, and it might get quite a bit colder than you’re expecting. I recommend bringing gloves, a woolly hat, and as many layers as you can carry. It’s far better to be overprepared!!
• Unless you’re camping very close to the car, you probably don’t want to bring a pillow. The main options I would suggest are: folding up all the spare layers you don’t end up sleeping in to rest your head on (see, they come in handy), or buying a camping pillow
• Bring some kind of breakfast you can eat as soon as you wake up in the tent with no preparation, whether this is fruit, muffins, cereal bars or something else. You normally have to wake earlier than usual when wild camping, and it can be very motivating when you have a tasty snack waiting at the foot of your sleeping bag!
• Forgo bringing to the tent unnecessary things like skincare, deodorant, spare underwear and so on. If you need them, you can leave them in the car as you should be back relatively early to use them anyway

Regarding dinner, you can either bring this with you, or try to eat it beforehand. The benefit of eating beforehand is that you can go to a warm country pub and have someone else cook for you, yum. The downside of this is that you might end up heading to your camping spot in the dark, depending on what time the sun is setting. 

Alternatively, you can bring a camping stove and make food at your pitch site, which is obviously a little more effort. If you’re wondering about camping food, the boil-in-a-bag meals are pretty good, whilst the dehydrated meals are foul and a worse option than even harvesting from the natural environment, or going without food. 

Final Top Tips

Before I end the article, I just wanted to finish off with some final top tips for having an awesome wild camping experience. Several of these are based on comments I’ve received from friends I introduced to it, so I know these are real concerns people may have!

• The wilderness is noisy. The sounds you hear at night are primarily wind rustling the grass, wind rustling the tent, wind rustling the trees, and so on. The sounds you hear at night are not serial killers, nor are they wild animals trying to eat your tent. I promise!!!
• The wilderness is not a campsite. If you’re expecting a nice, flat area with dry, even ground, you might be disappointed. That being said, the worst ground I have ever camped on was at a campsite. So, in some cases, the wilderness is better.
• Don’t get drunk (or high). If someone asks you to move on (which yes, is relatively unlikely, but still) you will not be able to drive your car.
• Tell someone where you’re going! This is probably obvious to most people, but I’m saying it just in case. And by the way, that person doesn’t have to be your parents. It’s okay to tell your parents you went wild camping the next morning, so they have the relief of knowing you already survived it 🙂
• If you see Bigfoot, the Yeti, or one of the 300 wild cats that have supposedly escaped zoos all over the UK, make sure you take a high quality photo so people will actually believe you. Otherwise, they probably won’t 😉
• Have fun!