If you read the post about my hot tub on Monday, you’ll know I went on holiday to Dorset last week. It’s no less a holiday for the fact that I live in Dorset. I went to stay in a vintage-style shepherd’s hut with glorious countryside views and today I want to show you around the hut.
As I said, there was a hot tub. That was the appeal of the thing, my very own private hot tub. But the reason I went at all was that it had its own ensuite bathroom. Camping feels very COVID-safe, you’re sitting in your own tent on your own like a growly little troll – and then you realise everyone on the entire site is sharing one portakabin with two toilets and one shower and you’re all touching the same mud-smeared door handle and filthy taps and there’s never any soap. So this particular shepherd’s hut appealed because it had a roof and solid walls and it had its own bathroom. I’m not experienced in shepherd’s huts but I think they generally don’t have ensuites.
To be fair, there’s not a lot of room in a shepherd’s hut for a bathroom. Half of mine was taken up with a shower – and I had hot water on demand thanks to two gas canisters hiding underneath the hut. You could have taken six inches out of the shower to make more space for everything else but it was such a joy to be able to run into a hot shower after getting out of a lukewarm hot tub in the evening. The trouble was that it was dark in there and it was cold. It was illuminated only by a candle and when I lit it, it gave off no light at all. Because the window wasn’t frosted, I had to close the blind if I was in there and that made it pitch-dark even by day, so mostly I had to leave the door open to get some light in, although I used my headtorch for that post-hot tub shower.
The rest of the hut was one big room – well, one small room. The heating was a wood burner and that meant I spent a lot of time freezing. I’m not a talented firelighter, although I’m better since I did my bushcraft course last year. I wasn’t helped in that by the lack of small firewood. I had plenty of birch bark and that burns like crazy, especially when you apply one of the firelighters to it. I don’t know what they’re made from; they look like dense bundles of straw or hay and they really go. So I get the firelighters going and I get the bark going but then there’s nothing between the bark and the logs and so it tends to go out, which is infuriating at seven in the morning, when I should be happily still sleeping for another two hours and instead I’ve been awake all night because I’m so cold, and I’ve been failing to light the fire in the dark with no glasses on, so I can’t even see what I’m doing.
However, if you do manage to get the fire going, it heats up the shepherd’s hut really quickly and really violently. One full-size log will turn it into a sauna. Two full-size logs, which I did throw in occasionally in an attempt to just get it burning, will turn it into a fire hazard. So there was no need to maintain the fire, once I’d got it lit. It didn’t need to stay lit. The wood burner in my hot tub was another matter – I had to keep that going at full heat for two to three hours, which means putting two or three logs on it every twenty minutes.
I had a small kitchen – well, I had a sink with hot and cold water, and various crates and cupboards containing pretty vintage crockery and a drawer full of cutlery and basic cooking tools and underneath, there was a box with solid cast-iron outdoor cook pots half an inch thick, for sitting on your firepit. I didn’t use the firepit – I was already having to look after two fires and I had no intention of adding a third. I also ran out of firelighters, thanks to having to start every single fire over and over again, and I was aware of how quickly I was running down the wood supply in the barbecue hut.
That was my other option – there was a shared barbecue hut which functioned as woodstore, indoor cooking facility & source of electricity. The barbecue in there is charcoal-powered and you have to buy a bag of charcoal, so I didn’t do that either but I made use of the fridge. I could have charged my phone but I have a shiny new phone which needed an hour or so on the portable charger every day and otherwise survived just fine. I could also use the electric kettle, if I didn’t want to light the firepit and put the outdoor kettle on it for half an hour for my morning tea but I don’t drink tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate very often either. If it had been easier to make it, I might have had hot chocolate but it would have required the firepit because you can’t put milk in the shared kettle.
Back to the shepherd’s hut. The rest of the space was my bed, which was quite high – high enough that I had to use the chairs to hop up onto the bed. Underneath, there was a door and the entire underneath was a giant storage space, so I could shove my bag, my food bag and all my junk in there to keep it tidy. It stayed cold under there, no matter how much I fired up the wood burner, so I could have just kept my cheese and my apple juice cool in there and saved myself the twenty second trek to the barbecue hut.
Above the cupboard was a table – a pull-out slab which shouldn’t have been as solid as it was. I didn’t eat off it much – it was easier to just sit on the bed to eat, because I had to clear off the chairs every time, and the chairs were about the only place I had where I could put stuff like my camera and my notebook. Eventually, I put it all in a bag and then I could just move the bag whenever I wanted the chair or the bed.
There’s not a lot else. I had a couple of candles for lighting and I had a string of solar-powered lights over the bed – the trouble was that they came on at dawn and stayed on all night. The best light was the old-fashioned industrial-style lightbulb, which switched on with a proper switch and was powered by a battery which was in turn powered by a solar panel. I had my headtorch and that was very useful, although whenever I wanted it, I’d left it somewhere out of reach.
And that was my shepherd’s hut. Its name was Forager and there were three on-site. Artisan was next door, with its own garden, surrounded by trees for privacy. It’s pretty similar but with a different colour scheme. Astronomer, on the other side of the site, is very different. That is, it’s basically the same but instead of being light and airy and pretty inside, it’s all dark blue and copper and has a glass panel in the roof so you can stargaze. It has its own barbecue area so they don’t need to share the barbecue hut with the rest of us. I’m not averse to staying in Astronomer but it’s more than 25% more expensive than the huts without the glass roof, which is just too much.
It’s an amazing setting – it’s up on a hill with views over green rolling scenery. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such green rolling hills in my life. From Artisan, the views are blocked out by the trees but from Forager, it’s brilliant, especially if you get a poodle posing in front of it. On the other hand, there’s a horrible farm track to get up to the huts. It’s a bit steep at first and then it turns into a proper tractor-friendly car-unfriendly track which scraped the bottom of my car. I planned to go out to the beach on the Monday but by the time I’d arrived and parked on Sunday afternoon, I decided I wasn’t driving on that track again until I had to leave and it’s the one thing that’s making me hesitant about going back in the summer.
Because, you see, it was freezing and there was nowhere to dry anything, but I enjoyed it and I’d go back again, but possibly in warmer, lighter weather. If the track was more accessible to my poor car. If I wasn’t reliant on my ability to light a fire to keep the ice out of my veins. Would I appreciate the hot tub quite so much in the sun? Maybe not. Hot water goes with cold weather.
I’m not converted to the joys of winter camping, not even glamping inside, but I’m converted to the idea of glamping and definitely to holidays so local you could be back in your own warm bed in under an hour.