It’s no slight to Wilderness Festival that one of its greatest pleasures is saying goodbye to it. A 30-minute walk from its main field takes you to the local Charlbury train station, a journey that finds you passing disused train tracks, babbling brooks, stone cottages and enormous fields of wheat. It’s the sort of England that Cameron Diaz moved to in The Holiday, or a place so chocolate-box beautiful that if a grisly murder happened here, we’d all be hearing about it for decades. Isn’t the natural world and everything in it so utterly, utterly gorgeous?
By design or not, this is what Wilderness does to a person. You go in a big-city misery-guts and leave pretty much the same, if just with a new and exciting fondness for foliage. This is a four-day event in the bucolic Oxfordshire countryside that encourages you to meditate, luxuriate and rot (serenely), with saunas on hand, massage chairs next to the loaded brownie stand, and champagne-battered fish on the menu. There’s also, if you squint, some music.
