I know, any travel or lifestyle blogger worth their salt has at least a little archive of festival content but this was my first time. Technically it’s not my first ever festival – I went to the Larmer Tree Festival for the evening in 2015 and for the whole day in 2019 but I’ve never been overnight, or stayed for the whole weekend. But last weekend I went to Camp Wildfire and it was brilliant!
Camp Wildfire takes Scout camp and fuses it to a festival. There’s music and drinking, of course, but it’s all secondary to days packed with adventurous activities. I met many people who’d opted not to drink much the night before or go to bed early so they’d be in a fit state for their 9am activity. And there are so many activities! They range from high-octane things like quadbiking, zorbing, axe-throwing, hot air ballooning and raft-building to things like choir, sign language, tai chi and wide games all the way down to peaceful things like creative writing, screenprinting and fermenting vegetables. There really is something for everything and there’s enough of that something to keep you occupied the entire weekend.
Not only does it star adventurous activities, everyone picks a Patrol and a lot of people wear their Patrol with pride. You can buy t-shirts and neckerchiefs and those were very common worn with otherwise-ordinary clothes. You can go all out with full costumes. Lots of people in ears, tails and wings. And plenty of people in Scout-style shirts plastered with badges. Not as many as Camp Wildfire’s official social media would have you think, but plenty nonetheless. The first draft of this post had a bit of a rant about the meaningless badges they’d bought to decorate the shirts – this is my culture and badges mean something and the sort of people who wear badges are good eggs and competent and you want them around in an emergency and I have no problem with these campers wearing badges but I got so tired of the disinterested “Oh yeah, I bought them on eBay” or “I dunno, someone gave it to me”. Badges show what you’ve achieved and who you are!
Anyway. Petty. I don’t know what typical festival merch is but at Camp Wildfire they go pretty heavy on the badges. I wanted a Camp Wildfire badge but they come in the four Patrol colours and that meant I had to pick a Patrol, if for no other reason than to pick a colour to buy the badge in.
Oh, I don’t identify with any of them! I’m not a Squirrel (“Cheeky, entertaining, sociable and energetic – loves having fun with others and making the most of the day”). A huge number of campers are, though. I’m not a Badger (“Fun, cheeky, ‘a bit loopy’, passionate, resilient and fun-seeking. Less active through the day; really comes to life at night”). I’m not a Fox (“Intelligent, creative and cunning; can be a bit of a trickster. Prefers night time but has been spotted playing in the daylight too”). And that leaves Hawks. I’m not a Hawk either but I don’t-identify with their description the least, if you follow that convoluted sentence (“Gentle, but determined; strong and valiant. Very able with good mental agility: the first to catch the worm”). I’m not cheeky, energetic and I don’t love having fun with others. I’m not “a bit loopy”. I’m not cunning or a trickster and I don’t prefer daytime. I’m not convinced I’m gentle; I’m definitely not the first to catch the worm. When I went through the four and crossed off all the things I’m definitely not, I had marginally more things left in Hawks than any others. I bought my badge in Hawk green but I still don’t identify with the Hawks and I can’t feel any personal Patrol pride that the Hawks won the weekend.
But I enjoyed how much everyone else engaged with the Patrols. Plenty of people wore Patrol neckerchiefs with their ordinary clothes – well, ordinary clothes for daytime activities. Bring on the sparkle & the weirdness for the evening. Plenty of people wore Patrol t-shirts. Some went full-on with the outfit. I particularly liked the two in the “I just like badgers, ok?” t-shirts. I liked how each Patrol had a particular thing they yelled back if you shouted “Any [Hawks] here??!!” I like how the Facebook group is full of gems like “Does anyone know a Badger called Josh who took photos of me during one of the activities?” and “I wish I’d had time to say goodbye to the Squirrels camping next to me”. You could earn Patrol tokens from your activities and then there were Patrol games in the evening.
And as I said, the activities come first. There was music in the evening. There was drinking. But there was no main stage and no acts I’d heard of, except Charlotte Church’s Pop Dungeon. There were talks and comedy in the Auditorium, which needed to be bigger. I caught most of Emma Lawton’s talk on getting Parkinson’s at 29 on Friday night and Tim FitzHigham’s talk on his weird and wild adventures on Saturday but I’m not the nighttime kind and that’s all I did. I would have liked to tumble into the hot tubs but they needed to be booked and I wasn’t sure I could, as I wasn’t actually enrolled – more on that in the next post. The music happened in a couple of tents that seemed a bit small for the number of people trying to squish in and it all went quiet by about half past midnight.
The woods made a buffer between the noisy part and the camping part so it was all a bit muffled anyway, but I was surprised at how quiet it all was. I know I’ve been very grumpy this summer over people making a noise while camping but I came to Camp Wildfire expecting chaos and a racket and… no, it was pretty quiet. Sure, people came home late and picked their way through the laser net of guyropes but they didn’t yell too much while they were doing so. I had some earplugs but I didn’t use them. That’s partly because they fall straight out but it’s mostly because it just wasn’t that noisy. Lots of vehicles driving down the dusty track behind the hedge at ridiculous times of night – do you really need to be driving around the field at 4am? – but on the whole, pretty quiet.
So what did I actually do? Well, for reasons that will become clearer later in the week, I played a lot of Capture the Flag. I did tai chi and discovered it’s really not my thing. I threw axes. Technically I threw tomahawks, which is something Girlguiding doesn’t allow, or possibly hasn’t allowed until recently because it “won’t endorse war games”. I shot a longbow – I teach archery so shooting a recurve is just someone trying to teach me something I already know just as well as them but this was a longbow! I was brilliant with my longbow in 2012 when I did my archery beginners course. A decade on and my aim was out by about a foot and a half, which is a lot. And dudes, I can load my own arrow and I don’t like drawing so far. I also shot a crossbow – I find them very impersonal and very… I don’t know, kind of clinical. A bit like pressing a button on a computer. It just doesn’t have any of the drama or any of the aim or any of the skill of shooting an actual bow or throwing an axe. I mean, it does. There’s aiming and there’s skill. I just don’t personally feel any of it. Ah! It doesn’t feel like I’m using my body to do it! That’s it! You feel a bow and an axe in your arms and your shoulders and your back and you have to be standing the right way to make sure the missile goes the right way. But crossbow, you hold it in one hand and squeeze with the other and that’s it. Finger and thumb. My arms and shoulders and back just don’t get involved. But it was right there and since I was enjoying some target sports, I figured I’d do the crossbow too.
I met a lot of people. Some weird, many wonderful. Most of them with precisely the right level of enthusiasm and competitiveness. I chatted to strangers dressed as Foxes in a way I just couldn’t have done even ten years ago. I was complimented on my bright turquoise and pink Rebel Badge Club neckerchief – I wanted to wear it for various reasons and it turned out wearing a neckerchief just didn’t look weird at Camp Wildfire. The majority of people were wearing them, although the majority of them were wearing them in Patrol colours. I was complimented on my green-blue sequin jacket on Friday night and was told I was “very easy to spot” by the gang who adopted me.
Oh! I haven’t mentioned the other badges! There are badges available for every activity! They’re quite expensive at £4 a pop – Girlguiding’s interest badges, which are a little bit bigger, are 60p each! – but nonetheless, I came home with a badge for Capture the Flag, Mindfulness (they didn’t have a tai chi one), Axe Throwing, Archery and Crossbow. Now, these ones I couldn’t resent campers for wearing on their fake uniforms – these really are things they’ve done and things they’ve achieved and it’s great fun to see someone with their face painted like a badger walking around with an armful of activity badges. It was almost enough to make me want to invest in a shirt – perhaps the official Girlguiding adult uniform shirt – and cover it in badges that meant something for next year. Perhaps a duplicate set of Wildfire activity badges, because this batch were going on my camp blanket, along with the wristband, once I’d carefully peeled it off and freed it of the slider.
I did take actual Guide uniform. Old-style Guide uniform, the one that was replaced with the current bright blue back in 2014. We found a hoodie in the cupboard – it was huge! Not only big enough for me but too big for me. It’s now old-style and the branding is pretty discreet and it seemed the ideal thing to wear for cold evenings at Camp Wildfire. I debated taking my badge tab – these are my badges and they’re real! – but in the end I decided it’s too precious and too easy to lose at a festival.
One negative: the toilets were pretty grim. There were a few portaloos scattered around and I never investigated the facilities at Central Camp but at the campsite there was a line of trailer-type toilets. They looked good – they had lights and mirrors and wooden doors but they were filled with black-blue chemicals that smelled like death. I think they were cleaned and restocked pretty regularly but they still got blocked and they smelled so bad that on Sunday I decided at 7am that I could wait for my next visit until I was at Clackett Lane services on my way home. I gather they’d paid £15k for nice classy composting non-smelly toilets but the suppliers pulled out and they had to throw another £15k at whatever they could get last minute, which was this, so I’m not going to blame Camp Wildfire entirely for the grim toilets. And anyway, they were better than I expected, which was overflowing portaloos everywhere.
So, overall: yeah, a very good first festival experience. Will I go again? I’m very seriously considering it, yes. Give me a month or so, because then I’ll have time to breathe and I’ll have had time for the whole thing to settle into my system and I’ll be able to better judge it from afar but at the moment, yes. Fan of Camp Wildfire. Just need to pick a Patrol.