Because I tend to over-fill my evenings and weekends, I found myself craving a weekend away where, for once, I wasn’t actually doing anything. Just reading, sewing and spending as much time as possible in the hot tub. Glamping is inherently less stressful than pitching your own tent and it’s more relaxing than a hotel. Or maybe that’s just because I just don’t spend enough to get the kind of hotel where you can really relax.
I wanted a hot tub, I wanted it relatively close to home and I had a budget, because glamping can reach prices well above what I think is tolerable for camping, even the glamorous variety. What I found was the Pheasant’s Retreat in mid Devon, a little way north of Exeter. Canopy & Stars calls it a treehouse but the description calls it a “suspended bedroom pod” with what the owners call “an adventure stayground”. It’s a little sprawly network of raised decking with the pod off the side of one arm, sheds housing the kitchen and bathroom in the middle and the hot tub on another leg, above the fire pit and outdoor furniture. Honestly, picturing the layout in advance before seeing the whole thing was very difficult – there are no photos showing the whole thing.
I arrived on a sunny Friday afternoon to be greeted by Dave & Emma before I’d even got out of the car. Dave hitched a trailer to a quad bike, I loaded my luggage in and then jumped in myself and off we went, out of the magnificent farmhouse’s manicured garden, back up the steep gravel track, a sharp right into the next field up and I was delivered to a copse of trees, my home for the next 36 hours and the answer to the mysterious layout of the Pheasant’s Retreat. Basically, it’s a raised deck running past sheds housing the bathroom and kitchen, down to the hot tub and further to the firepit and solid wooden chairs, with the tree tent off to the left at the top, opposite the bathroom, which comes complete with running, hot water and solar-powered lighting.
Sitting in the hot tub over the weekend, I surveyed my little domain, which despite being little more than 100 yards from the farmhouse, feels very isolated. That’s in a good way – Peace and seclusion and silence other than the endless racket of assorted birds, the occasional screaming fox, a tractor in the distance, the wind rustling through the trees and the bellowing of 1000+ sheep. If you’ve never been to the countryside, please don’t take the title of Hannibal Lecter’s most famous appearance as fact: even happy, healthy, non-tortured lambs are not silent! But these are countryside noises. Normally I’d be able to hear a road somewhere, surprisingly noisy for the amount of traffic I’d expect on it but no road noise. The loudest plane in the world flew over on Saturday afternoon; I have yet to find the local paper that runs the “residents annoyed and baffled by really loud plane” story but I know it exists somewhere. Anyway, this secluded spot under the trees, with suspended egg-shaped tent and hot tub… when you look at the copse and mentally remove the decking, you’re not left with a bit of ground that most people would picture as the perfect place for glamping.
It’s essentially a semi-sunken overgrown steep-sided copse with a stream running around two sides of it, wedged between two fields. But when you put in that decking and that tent and that hot tub, somehow, unaccountably, you’ve got something magical. It’s not steep, it’s 3D. It’s not overgrown, it’s under the shade of several varieties of tree. It’s not slightly swampy, it’s got a nice stream which no doubt helps carry away the hot tub water when it’s emptied between guests. Oh, and wonderful touch: it’s already lit and hot when you arrive! I admit, in this case, it was too hot but they didn’t know when I’d be turning up and I myself have dramatically overheated every hot tub I’ve ever lit since figuring out how to do it.
Let’s go into the tent. For all I keep calling it an egg, it’s pretty perfectly spherical and I’m not sure it’s what you’d picture as a tent since the structure itself is wood and aluminium with a canvas covering and quilted panels velcroed inside for insulation. It has two egg- shaped beds set in the round walls, a tiny woodburner with a chimney sticking out through the canvas, a most inconvenient metal pole right in the middle holding the roof up, with a small wooden table wrapped around it and a wooden shelf suspended from the frame next to the right-hand bed. For small things like glasses and headtorches, the wooden frame proved more than adequate shelf and the wooden ring at head height had a dimmable circle of LEDs in it, also powered by the solar panel outside. On the one hand, that was great. On the other, the dimmer knob is right by the door, at the foot of the other bed, as far from my hands as you can get in a sphere maybe eight feet in diameter. I turned it off and used my headtorch to get back to bed.
I knew I wasn’t going to light the woodburner. I’ve been caught out by May nights many times before but the bedding was warm and the sphere is well-insulated and I found myself unzipping the window next to me instead of wishing I had logs and lighter. My only criticism is that you can’t cover the windows. I had no fear of anyone looking in but it gets light very early at this time of year and I’m ludicrously light-sensitive. It also had a semi-open top – that is, a curved plastic lid sat not quite touching the canvas, allowing views of the trees and stars overhead but also ingress of bugs, including presumably the wasp that bullied me out of bed at 7am on Saturday. I’d also like a bit more storage space. Travelling solo, I used the other bed to leave my bags and warm layers on but if I’d been with someone else, we’d have had to force it all into the limited space under the beds.
It feels mean to criticise. It was an interesting and generally delightful place to spend two nights. It might have felt cramped if it hadn’t been as warm and dry as it was. Of course, I spent a lot of time in the hot tub but when I wasn’t there, I ate or read on the wooden picnic furniture by the fire pit or sat in the swinging chair by the gate. 36 beautiful hours outside in this weird 3D playground, getting through three books (Love Among the Chickens by PG Wodehouse; Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers; Ships of Heaven by Christopher Sommerville), which I was acutely aware might start to feel like a prison if it rained. There’s nowhere to go for shelter except the sphere, unless you want to sit in the bathroom, which is a shed. A shed with a great shower and the softest robes in practical dark grey but a shed nonetheless.
A second favorite detail about the hot tub – or third, if you count the robes – was that its woodburner was on the edge of the deck. It meant you had to go down four more steps and round the side of the decking but it also meant it was at eye-level and I didn’t have to crouch to pack in logs and kindling and see whether I’d been successful in my lighting. Nice. The floating thermometer was another nice touch, as was the two-part lid with good, solid handles. I’ve struggled with some very unwieldy covers in my time, never meant to be lifted by one person. Honestly, as hot tubs go, that’s probably my number one.
The kitchen was a kind of shed front rather than a whole shed, with two gas rings, a sink with running hot water and a cupboard full of essentials – pots and pans, cutlery, enamel crockery, wine glasses, firelighters, a fox-proof plastic food storage box and a cool box, plus a pint of whole milk and the softest gooiest chocolate cake. I often read reviews of glampers being left a cake but it’s never happened to me before. The shelf above the sink had a fire pit cookbook and a dizzying array of silicone utensils, plus jars of tea, coffee and sugar. An excellent camp kitchen but again, imagine making a cup of tea or washing the dishes in the rain.
I did not have so much as a drop of rain! I was able to spend the whole weekend just taking time out from the world in my odd little green paradise. I read a lot, I sat in the hot tub a lot, I cooked campfire pizzas over the fire pit (filled pitta bread wrapped in foil and left to melt; I wasn’t quite as successful with the fire pit as with the hot tub’s stove, so my pizza wasn’t quite the gooey cheesy mess I hoped for) and I just generally enjoyed not watching the world go by. Not even any phone signal down there, although it reappeared 200m away if you walked up the next field, so I was pretty much cut off from the world. And what did I miss? Everything that happened in the Doctor Who finale (and it was a lot!) and Taylor Swift buying back her masters and effectively cancelling the rest of the rerecording project! And PSG fans destroying half of Paris, apparently.
It was a much-needed weekend away. I pack a lot into my free time and I’m at Guide camp and Brownie residential over the next two weekends, so a weekend all to myself to recharge my batteries was just what I needed. But I’ll tell you more about the Guide stuff later…
I Am A Polar Bear 