A horse invaded my tent: camping in the New Forest

It’s been a really long winter. Summer is due any day and we still haven’t had spring. I began to feel a bit stir-crazy – I have a new (to me; I rescued it) tent that I really wanted to try out and the year was flying by and I still hadnt planned any camping trips.

I wanted to camp in the New Forest. Camping is about spending a few days not doing a lot, it’s not about going a long way or exploring new places, so I was after somewhere pretty close and pretty peaceful and the New Forest seemed to fit those criteria. But actually, there aren’t many campsites and the ones that do exist skew towards the big Camping & Caravanning Club sites where your neighbour is in a huge white plastic box almost on top of you. The one I eventually found looked like an oversized parking place, off the main road between Beaulieu and Brockenhurst, called Roundhill.

Even mid-late April was too early in the year for camping, it turned out. The campsite was huge but very quiet and a bit soggy in the middle. I really struggled with the new tent. It’s a five-man dome tent and I’m quite capable of pitching that on my own – if a strong wind doesn’t grab it and throw it into a nearby thorn bush. Want to see how many times that happened? I filmed it!

The plan was to spend the weekend sitting or lying outside the tent, reading, hand-writing a couple of blog posts in my notebook, sewing badges on my camp blanket and walking around the New Forest. But once the tent was up and I’d eaten a very late lunch outside in the sun, I began to realise how big the campsite really is. I needed to do my usual 2km daily walk and rather than drive out to a good walkable bit of forest, I decided I’d just walk around the campsite. Two birds with one stone: you really should get an idea of the layout of your temporary home.

My tent, a large blue dome with a porch, open to the sun. Outside is a folding chair and tiny table. The whole setup is in a little clearing in the campsite with trees behind it.

The trouble was the rain. There had been a huge shower just as I was getting out spare guyline and knife – it was windy and the sides of the tent were flapping – but once the big black cloud passed, it turned sunny again, or at least sunny enough to explore the far end of the site, find a stream and a treetop water container and cover 1.5 of my 2km. But then another cloud went over. Do I try to get the last 500m in or do I retreat to the tent and try again later?

Roundhill Campsite, an expanse of short pony-cropped grass with patches of gorse and prickly bushes and surrounded by pine trees. There's a big threatening black cloud coming over the trees.

It took a ridiculous amount of time to think of putting on my shiny new waterproof jacket. I won it, in a competition I didn’t know existed and hadn’t entered, simply by putting a picture from a canoe on Instagram and tagging it #gopaddling. Go Paddling, the “why not give it a go?” arm of governing body Paddle UK, chose it as their spring picture winner and entered it into a draw, which I won, and only heard about when they DM’d me to ask what size and colour of waterproof trousers and jacket set I wanted. The jacket is light enough to not be too hot but it’s also very waterproof and has a huge pocket for my extremely rain-phobic camera.

Selfie standing by a pond that doesn't have a single ripple marring its perfect reflection of the sky above. I'm wearing a bright blue waterproof jacket with a protective flap underneath the half-zip, which I've left undone.

So off I went to the other end of the campsite, where there’s a small pond and the reception cabin. Reception had some local information and this is where I discovered something really interesting. Roundhill is now a campsite but a century ago, it was the living quarters for WWI airfield RAF Beaulieu. Where I was camping was once barracks and down by reception was quarters for officers. I don’t know exactly where RAF Beaulieu is but it can’t be far away if this is where the staff live.

That’s why the campsite is the layout that it is, with the roads where they are and presumably why there’s a huge water tower hidden in the trees. So that was exciting.

A copy of hand-drawn maps of the old RAF living site and of nearby Beaulieu airfield, with exquisite writing telling you the history of the two places.

On Saturday, I started the day lazily – well, as lazy as I can be when I’m camping. I’m always up early in a tent. I washed up yesterday’s lunch things, had breakfast and took my chair outside to read in the sun. Only the weather wasn’t cooperating. Oh, the sun was hot and the big black rainclouds were no more but there was a freezing wind. In less than ten minutes, I had to retreat to the shelter of the tent to get out of the wind, only I had to leave the tent door part open because nylon tents are absolute greenhouses. It’s not ideal, having a tent door flapping violently.

So I passed the day reading and writing and eating. A lot of eating. It was either too cold or too hot to sew any of the badges on but I finished Six of Crows and started Crooked Kingdom. And then the horse arrived.

Three brown horses grazing on the short grass on the campsite. You can see a caravan in the background between the trees. I was too preoccupied to take photos of the moment one of them tried to come into the tent.

The New Forest is home to wild horses, cows, donkeys and sometimes pigs. Well, they’re not entirely wild. My understanding is that they do all belong to someone but they’ve been allowed to roam freely for hundreds of years. You use cattlegrids to keep them out of a few places, not in them. They can’t get onto the A31, the huge duel carriageway that crosses the Forest, they can’t get onto the London-Weymouth railway line and there are a few private properties they’re barred from. Roundhill is not one of them. You have to keep your food sealed to keep the horses out and that was fine – I upgraded from an insulated bag for life to a plastic box and I kept the tent zipped up whenever I left but I wasn’t expecting a horse invasion while I was in.

Several horses grazing on one of the more open parts of the campsite, minding their own business.

There are a few rules with the animals. Don’t touch them – they’re wild(ish) animals and might bite. Don’t feed them – it’s not good for them and it encourages them to pester people. Don’t approach them – again with the biting and maybe the kicking. But when a horse has its head in your tent, you tell me how to get it out without touching it. These horses aren’t trained, they don’t respond to “go away!!” and they don’t really respond to being smacked on the nose, either. You don’t realise how big a horse, even a relatively small New Forest pony, is until its head is in your tent. Was it moving in? Was there anything I could do if it did?

The first one got the message relatively quickly but the second.. well, I began to wonder if I was going to have to abandon tent and hope the horse would wander off of its own accord, leaving the tent – hopefully – still standing. It took a lot of nose-smacks and a lot of pleading before it eventually lost interest. I spent the rest of the weekend a lot more wary of the campsite visitors than I had been for the first half.

A black cow in the thick hedge immediately behind my tent.

I didn’t leave the site for Saturday’s walk. Driving across the field back to the tracks didn’t appeal and neither did leaving the tent to the mercy of the horses. So for the second day, I walked around the campsite.

A dip in the landscape, slightly boggy, with lots of trees.

A campsite road with a thick tall hedge on one side, a smaller hedge on the other and caravans visible.

The campsite pond. There are some other campers sitting on a bench on the other side of it, trees in the background etc.

It wasn’t the camping trip of my dreams. It was too cold. You know what April was like. I got lucky in that there was only one heavy shower and the sun was mostly out and hot but there was a constant freezing wind which made it impossible to sit outside, and that’s what I do when I’m camping. I sit out either on my folding chair or on my blanket, I read, I enjoy not doing a lot, not being at home, not doing my to-do list. But by Saturday evening, it dawned on me that I was just enduring it. Why didn’t I go home? Partly because I had planned to spend two nights in the tent and partly because it was far too late in the day to empty and pack up my tent, plus the literal car-full of stuff. I’d be striking the tent in the dark and then driving across the New Forest in the dark. You don’t want to be driving across a semi-wilderness with black horses and cows strolling in the road. We all know now how big horses are and how much damage they can do.

A black bull and its dark grey half-grown calf walking across the campsite to join the cow and the other calf.

So I stayed. The first night had been freezing but the second was warmer – whether that was down to the fleece pyjama top I wore rather than the several layers of day clothes or whether it was genuinely a warmer night, I don’t know. But I was up at 7am (because tent!) and by 9am, I’d had breakfast and packed everything up and was a quarter of the way home.