“Current access legislation”

Tents cannot be pitched just anywhere because every piece of Britain is owned by some individual or some organisation and according to the strict letter of the law permission must be obtained prior to pitching tent and camping.

 

In practice however, this is often impractical and wild camping is usually tolerated in the more remote areas – typically, more than half a day’s walk from an official campsite or other accommodation providing you:

• Keep groups small
• Camp as unobtrusively as possible
• Leave camp as you found it
• Remove all litter (even other people’s)
• Carry out everything you carried in
• Carry out tampons and sanitary towels (burying them doesn’t work as animals dig them up again)
• Choose a dry pitch rather than digging drainage ditches around a tent or moving boulders
• Toilet duties should be performed 30m (100ft) from water and the results buried using a trowel
• At all time, help preserve the environment
• And if you are in any doubt about what you’re doing, find out more

In Scotland, the current access legislation (which came into effect in early 2005) is explicit about your right to wild camp on hill land providing you are at least 100 metres away from a public road.

 

There appears to be an exception to this with respect to camping in Dartmoor National Park where the right to wild camping is actually enshrined in the National Parks & Access to the Countryside Act, 1949 amendment Dartmoor Commons Act, 1985 – see Wild Camping in the UK for more details. Enjoy it not destroy it…….

~ by tommykelly3 on February 27, 2008.