As a queer woman in my early thirties, I’m not a stereotypical wild camper: neither a solo man nor half of an outdoorsy heterosexual couple. I never camped as a child on family holidays and the first time I put up a tent was last year at the Knepp Rewilding Project in Sussex.
But camping sans toilets and a designated site with electricity, rubbish bins and clean water has been a fascination of mine since reading Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path during lockdown. In the book, Winn documents wild camping with her husband along the South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset. It wasn’t just me gravitating to the great outdoors either, as post-pandemic Mintel research found that 4.5 million Brits went camping for the first time when restrictions eased.
