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Three of the best glamping trips
From treehouses to gleaming white domes, Alice Gråhns looks at where to get your wellies on and go glamping.
The Woodsman's Treehouse: something like a sleepover in a Wendy house for grown-ups
(Image credit: Hasselblad H3D)
This is the moneyed professional's equivalent of convincing mum to let you sleep the night in the Wendy house, says Laura Chubb in The Independent. Though at The Woodsman's Treehouse in Dorset, "playtime is about as luxurious as you can get when you're spending the night up a tree". The treehouse is set "deep in the sticks" in the West Country, and is wrapped around an oak among some yurts and huts. It's like "walking into some sort of alternative commune, or an Ewok campsite".
Everything in the treehouse is precisely crafted, making for a living area that is "cosier than a Dane sitting by a fire in a pair of overthick socks". The lower deck features a playground slide that "whizzes you down to the leaf-covered woodland floor". Guests can enjoy their own hot tub and sauna on the second floor, or an outdoor shower. Though the site itself is in a remote location near the tiny hamlet of Holditch, near Chard, the area has plenty to please upmarket glampers. Forde Abbey is an easy 45-minute walk away it is a former medieval monastery with "beautifully presented gardens that are well worth a wander".
Waking up in bed to the smell of bacon cooking, then sitting on a fancy wooden porch with coffee isn't what you'd normally associate with camping, says Joe Frost in The Sun. But it's par for the course when you're "glamping", and the Ready Camp at Dartmouth, Devon, is a new addition to the growing number of "glampsites" in the country. Frost stayed in a two-bedroom safari tent that came with proper beds, a sofa and a kitchen/diner that opened out on to a large wooden porch with space for a barbecue. "All you have to do is turn up and relax."
The sea view from the campsite is "just a teaser for the real treat moments down the road the valley into Dartmouth". A quaint harbour town, Dartmouth is rich in maritime heritage and coastal charm. Take one of the hour-long cruises that set out regularly from a pontoon on the river for a tour past the Britannia Royal Naval College, Agatha Christie's former home and "countless other picture-postcard views". In other words, despite the fancy new huts, this is a traditional trip to the seaside and still one of the best holidays that money can buy "especially now Ready Camp has added a little glamour to the great outdoors".
Le Monteil is a place to indulge your fantasties of moving to an empty part of France and trying out a bit of rural self-suffiency, says Clare Longrigg in The Guardian. From the farmhouse smallholding, where you'll stay in gleaming white domes with log-burning stoves and views of the surrounding meadows and forest, you can walk for miles and not meet a soul though you may well see wolves in the forest of Chabrires, a 15-minute drive away.
At the same time, your trip to the south central wilds needn't mean suffering austerities. There are sofas, a proper bed and a shower in a bathroom. "When you wake in the morning, your can hear nothing but birdsong and your shoes are dry."
A new luxury camp set to open in 2018in Cambodia will be "unlike any otherresort in Asia", says Jim Dobson inForbes. The Shinta Mani Wild PrivateNature Sanctuary created by BillBensley, a "modern-day Willy Wonka"who creates new projects with wildenthusiasm and passion, is workingto minimise the environmental impactof his resorts and create sustainablejobs for the locals.
Bensley discoveredthe site for his new project in a wildlifecorridor connecting the Bokor NationalPark with the Kirirom National Park andventured out to protect the 400-acrevalley from poaching, mining andlogging. At the resort, each luxury tentwill be designed to perch over rapidlymoving river and waterfalls and guestswill be able to explore "the nevertravelled waterways" of the southeastof Cambodia aboard the resort's ownluxury expedition boats.
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Alice grew up in Stockholm and studied at the University of the Arts London, where she gained a first-class BA in Journalism. She has written for several publications in Stockholm and London, and joined MoneyWeek in 2017.
Alice is now Consumer Editor at The Sun and covers everything from energy bills to Social Security.
