One of the pleasures of wild camping is the opportunity to sleep under the stars in a beautifully remote location. However, there are many things to consider before packing your tent and heading for the hills. Is wild camping legal or not? Do you have to seek the landowner’s permission? What are the guidelines?
Firstly, it’s important to define what is meant by ‘wild camping’. It is, by its simplest definition, camping outside of a campsite, generally in a remote location and out in nature. For most hillwalkers and mountaineers, it’s usually considered to be a fleeting and discreet overnight stay in a place far from roads and settlements – usually high on the hills well away from towns and villages, travelling light with a small shelter, and vanishing the next day leaving little more than a small impression on the grass.
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Wild camping in the Lake District
Wild camping is technically not permitted anywhere in the Lake District without prior permission from the landowner. In England and Wales, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (aka the CRoW Act) gives a right of access on foot to land which was mapped as mountain, moor, heath and down, defined as ‘Open Access land’. If you want to wild camp on Open Access land, you are required to get the landowner’s permission first – but there are no complete, publicly accessible records of land ownership so that’s not usually feasible. However, like in Scotland, there is a long tradition of camping in the hills which many landowners, including the National Trust which owns much of the fellside in the Lake District, acknowledge. Whilst wild camping is technically a trespass, it is generally tolerated so long as you follow the guidelines.
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What are the guidelines?
There is a wild camping code of conduct, which is a set of guidelines produced by many organisations, including the National Trust and the Lake District National Park Authority here in the Lake District. Although the list of guidelines differs slightly in the wording, there is a general conduct that should be followed so that the act of wild camping on private land can continue to be “tolerated”. These guidelines were put in place to ensure that campers can practice wild camping in a sustainable way that will cause minimal impact to the natural landscape, as well as the people and wildlife who call it home. There are several practices within these guidelines that should be followed at all times.
The rewards of wild camping high on the Lakeland fells are well worth the effort of following a few simple guidelines. Below is a version of these guidelines that I’ve personally put together, and which I follow as closely as possible. Some are clear and obvious, while others are slightly more technical, but generally speaking it comes down to common sense. After all, the more responsible you are the more you’ll be respected as a true wild camper.
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The guidelines
There’s a long tradition of wild camping in the Lake District but there’s a world of difference between true wild camping and illegal fly camping. Please read these guidelines carefully to help you decide whether wild camping is right for you or whether an established campsite would be a better option.
“Follow the seven, and only leave an impression – a good one!”
1. Leave no trace
There is a golden rule to wild camping, and that is leave no trace! Ensure you collect all your rubbish and take it with you. This helps to protect the environment and respect other visitors to the area. Leave the site as you found it, and this includes not burying any litter or moving rocks. Bag up and carry out all your litter, including food scraps. Don’t leave holes or fire damage, and take care not to damage trees and other vegetation. Walk the site slowly before leaving to check that nothing is missed. Wild camping locations should be left exactly as campers found them, and you should leave the site so no one can tell you’ve even been there. It is also good practice to remove any litter that has been left behind by other people.
2. Toilet duties
It is not acceptable to simply cover up toilet waste with rocks. If I need to ‘go’, I will do so by digging a shallow hole with a trowel, at least 30 metres away from any water source, and then cover the contents with turf. While human waste should be buried, sanitary items should always be bagged up and carried out, and not buried because animals will dig them up. It’s also important not to use substances such as shampoo, soap or detergents in local water sources such as becks, tarns and lakes.
3. No Fires
Open fires are strictly prohibited anywhere in the Lake District unless permission has been granted by the landowner. Even if there is evidence that fires might have been lit by previous campers, only camping stoves should be used to cook food to avoid impacting on the landscape. Sadly we often see fire pits around lake shores and wooded areas, but the most dangerous place of all in the Lake District to light fire is at an old slate quarry; a fire lit above a slate spoil heap that contains pockets of air and centuries of decaying vegetation, can spread quickly and continue to do so for many weeks afterwards, resulting in the destruction of a very important historical site.
4. Arrive late and leave early
Plan to reach your chosen location late in the day and leave early next morning. This will have less impact on other people who are out enjoying the beautiful landscape. In the summer months I pitch no earlier than 7pm and I tend to leave no later than 8am the next morning. However, during the dark evenings of mid-winter, when the nights are much longer, I arrive just before sunset, leaving me enough time to pitch safely and to photograph the sun going down. I will then leave the following morning shortly after sunrise.
5. Stay one night and move on
Campers should not use a site as a ‘base camp’ and then head for the hills, leaving their tents still pitched in the same location for numerous days. This guideline is in place to avoid causing damage to the land, flora and fauna within a specific area. However, the reality is that we often see tents pitched in the middle of the day, often around tarns and in wooded areas, which spoils the natural look of the landscape for other visitors.
6. Only one or two tents
Keep group numbers small to reduce noise and light, and to minimise the disturbance to wildlife and farm animals. From a distance at night, a group of head torches can be mistaken for flashing lights, and due to the increasing popularity of wild camping there has been a huge increase in emergency call outs mistaking lights for distress signals. This is a waste of resources and needlessly puts lives at risk. Both the National Trust and the Lake District National Park Authority have this guideline on their websites, but sadly this request is often ignored.
7. Camp high and out of sight
The terms “camp above the highest fell wall” or “above 400 metres” can be confusing, especially in the Lake District where walls are situated over ridges and summits, and with some enclosures well below 400 metres. Generally speaking though, you should camp above any valley intakes (walls that separate the pasture, farmland and grazing land from open fell), well out of sight and away from towns, villages and lake shores. Summit camping is fine in the Lake District as long as you pitch late and leave early, and move on if anyone else is already pitched there. The term “out of sight” is often misunderstood in the Lake District, but it refers to out of sight from “towns, villages and farms etc”, and not necessarily from people walking the fells; I camp as high as possible and away from popular paths and tarns, and because I pitch so late in the evening, the likelihood is that I’ll be out of sight of anybody else on the fells.
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I just want to conclude with a quote from National Trust ranger Roy Henderson, taken from an interview he gave while on a summit camp on Green Gable:
“We have people that are wild camping who are responsible; they put the tent up late, they take the tent down early, and leave no trace, and that’s really not a problem. Then we have the other people that are coming; they are fly-camping, and that is a real problem. So they are camping close to their cars, close to the roads, close to the lake shores, leaving a lot of mess and lighting fires. There’s a big difference from what wild campers are doing and what fly-campers are doing. We have guidelines at the National Trust, and if you are following our guidelines, and you are camping well above the fell wall, high on the fell, you’re leaving no trace, tent down early, and then we are happy with that.”
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Thanks, sources and further reading:
‘The Wild Camping Code’ by Ben Weeks, Live for the Outdoors
‘Wild Camping’ by the Lake District Park Authority
‘Wild Camping in the Lake District’ by the National Trust