Camping in Cumbria

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 24 May 2011 in admin | 3 comments

Apologies for the lack of posts of late – we had four days camping planned for over the weekend and I spent Thursday preparing the garden for four days by itself, so was too tired to post that evening. I’d hoped that I’d come back with lots of post ideas – frugal holidays! ace walks! foraging! exciting stories of catching our dinner flyfishing! – but it didn’t quite work out as planned… We had one fine evening but after the 24 hours of constant rain and strong winds that followed, we decided enough was enough and came home.

We’d been wanting to try camping for a while – neither of us had been camping for more than a decade but it seemed cheap, Lily-dog friendly and could be somewhere pleasantly remote (three things we like in holidays). A couple of weeks ago, back when it was still sunny and warm, I booked us into Low Wray campsite in the Lake District, using Eurocamp. It would have cheaper to have booked directly with the campsite but since it was our first time, we decided to go with Eurocamp — it’s the camping equivalent of renting a fully equipped self-catering cottage and meant we didn’t have to buy a whole load of equipment for an experimental, possibly-one-off trip.

Low Wray is a lovely woodland site – right next to the lake on the Western shore, about four miles south-ish from Ambleside, surrounded by grazing land. It’s owned by the National Trust and aside from the (newly refurbished) toilet blocks & gravel paths for cars, it does feel like you’re camping in a copse in the middle of nowhere. There are some lakeside pitches, some woodland ones (including some pretty remote/hidden ones and the Eurocamp block) and some more meadowland ones (including a tipi field). A really nice place – and I would recommend it if you like camping.