No matter how far the twenty-first century marches on, no matter what it throws at us, camping on an uninhabited island will always feel like something out of a 1920s children’s adventure story. My weekend camping on Brownsea Island was full-on Swallows and Amazons, minus the cooking fire (Brownsea is too much of a fire risk for anything except gas stoves) and the boat wars (I don’t have a boat; I was alone among the few campers in that this weekend).
It was two days of peace, tranquility and nothing to do except bask in the silence and the nature. Well, it wasn’t that silent. The moment the day visitors go home at 5pm on the last boat, you realise the oil works over on Furzey Island are humming – very quietly but once you notice it, you’ll never not notice it again. What you think is a motorbike on Brownsea’s southern track, up above the campsite, is actually a small boat with a very loud engine trying to zoom around Poole Harbour. That clanking noise is the Sandbanks chain ferry. Oh, and you’ve got shrieking peacocks, whistling oystercatchers and whirring nightjars going all night. But despite all the noise, it was all very peaceful.
Brownsea is a nature reserve. Once you’ve taken in the Scouting and Guiding heritage of the campsite, where BP held his experimental camp that begat both those movements, there’s nothing else to do, exactly. You just enjoy being outside, walking through the trees and along the beach and looking out for deer and squirrels. If nothing else, camping on an island forces you to really take a break from the real world. There’s no internet, no TV, not even any electricity. You’ve got hot water up at the washing-up sinks powered by gas cylinders and there’s the snack van during visitor hours but other than that, all you’ve got is a tent and a lot of nature. Ok, we’re a mile from the centre of Poole. There’s mobile internet. But there’s nowhere to charge your phone.
One of my favourite things about camping is eating my breakfast outside in the fresh air, usually a lot earlier than I would at home. On Brownsea I had three peahens to fend off on Saturday morning – I’m accustomed to shoving away large hungry dogs but large birds with pointy beaks and no comprehension of the words “no!” or “down!” are a different matter. The large male I shared my breakfast with on Sunday was no problem. He perched on a fence and shrieked occasionally but he didn’t actually come over to pester me until the food was long gone and I was just sitting and admiring the view – a view he complemented by getting that fantastic tail out. It troubles me a little that there was no evidence of peahens anywhere nearby. Was the bird flirting with me? Or have the peacocks just learnt that visitors will gather and ooh at them and give them food if they display?
I spent Saturday making a circuit of Brownsea. At the moment, day visitors are booked on a specific ferry each way which only gives them three hours on the island. It’s long enough to get all the way round but it’s not long enough to take your time and linger, to sit on the beach and look for seals or meditate on the swinging seat on the Cambridge trail or have lunch with the chickens down at Church Field. You need to camp for two nights to really have that luxury. And I did. I took a mini 4×4 scrapbook, which is still far from finished but I did some drawing and I kept a diary for at least Saturday morning and I stuck in a sand sample, which didn’t work as well as I hoped. I just sat on the beach, in the short stretch that has golden sand rather than 150-year-old weathered heavy pottery (it’s like a shingle beach but it clinks when you walk in it) and daydreamed and wrote. I took shelter from the hot sun in the cool shady pine woods. I didn’t see any deer but I spied a couple of red squirrels, who are looking quite blonde in places at the moment.
On Saturday evening I planned to sit on the beach and watch the sun go down over Poole Quay, with the minor quibble that Poole Quay is kind of due north of the bit of beach I planned to sit on. It’s a nice tranquil spot in the evening and I like watching the lights and hustle & bustle of industry. But on a sunny June Saturday evening – no tranquility! Every rich kid with access to a boat had come over to swim and drink and play music and send people ashore to walk on the beach. Not many of them were actually landing because the party’s on the boat, not the island, but it doesn’t make for a peaceful evening watching the world go by. Instead, I did a circle of the west end of the island and found a herd of deer up on the Horse Field. A few of them made horrified faces at me but when I didn’t make any sudden moves or loud noises, most of them were quite content to stand and nibble and keep checking on me.
Nevertheless, once you’re a few metres back from the shore, the party boats fade away. By Saturday, there were two other tents on the island. My nearest neighbours, in the next field, on the other side of the woods, were a couple with a toddler and it turned out they were fishing off the south shore in their own private tender. The others were a couple another field away who were still cooking dinner when I set out and who probably stayed around the campsite. I met them briefly when we were both at the drinking taps at the same time and that’s the only time I ever saw them. My wander was totally alone, other than the deer. As the sun finally began to set and turn the sky interesting colours, I went down to the beach below the campsite, found a place to sit in the shingle and pottery – and naturally, that was precisely the spot where my neighbours wanted to park their boat when they returned five minutes later. I’m willing to be smiley and polite but you did that on purpose.
On Sunday my Swallows & Amazons weekend came to an end. I loaded all my stuff back into my big bag, returned my useful box of cooking stuff and traipsed off to the jetty at the far end of Brownsea. I’d eaten most of my food and drunk most of my drink so the bag was a lot lighter and it was just early enough in the morning that the heat hadn’t yet become ferocious. Because of the weight of the bag, I allowed myself more than twice as much time as I should actually need and that meant I could sit in Church Field again, read another couple of chapters of my book and have elevenses surrounded by chickens again.
I know it doesn’t sound very exciting. It wasn’t exciting. It was never supposed to be. It was supposed to be peaceful and tranquil and beautiful and it was all of those things. I had an old-fashioned weekend on an uninhabited island, I got a little sunkissed, I had my breakfast outside and appreciated trees and birds and not being at home and it was everything I hoped it would be. With a few more bugs than I anticipated. A week later, I was still clawing at my poor bitten legs.
My last post was a tour/review of the campsite and the tree tent and I can’t remember if I mentioned that I enjoyed the tent and the peace so much that I lay in my tent at 6.30am on Sunday and booked a return trip for another nice relaxing weekend on Brownsea. I requested the same tree tent, the one with the great view out over Furzey and Purbeck rather than one more enclosed by trees and we’ll see whether I get it. We’ll also see whether anyone else has noticed that Brownsea camping is now open to the public and whether it’s quite as tranquil. It’s actually mid-week so I’m hoping to get at least one evening without any party boats to just sit and watch Poole Quay.
