Blinkbonny Wood Camping

Everyone (apart from maybe Freddy Krueger and Goths) prefers sweet dreams to nightmares. For campers the dream is to arrive at a secluded wood, pitch up and have the place to yourself. Once the birds have gone to bed there’s nothing but the rustle of the bracken and the odd falling pine cone to disturb your slumbers.

This 100-acre woodland of mixed pine and broadleaf in East Lothian has only two small clearings in the bracken for a maximum of four tents at a time. And it’s all so far from any road that you’d need a high-powered Spooks-style surveillance kit to detect any sound. You also have to leave your wheels at the gate and walk up the track for five minutes to find the site. Each pitch has a stone fire pit and rough, wooden bench seats so you can cook and keep your bum dry at the same time. Just around the hill from the pitches sits a log cabin offering a snug vantage-point for spotting birdlife and deer. And if you look back towards Edinburgh, you can see the rump of Arthur’s Seat rising into the sky.

The views from the pitches are none too shabby, either. They’re a bit subtler, though, looking out over the soft farmland towards the sea, with the bird-splattered Bass Rock poking out of the water, and Traprain Law in the distance. The law is a large earthen mound, first used as a burial chamber in about 1500 bc and subsequently used as a fort before housing a Roman town. You can also see North Berwick Law, a 180-metre volcanic plug, topped off by a replica pair of whales’ jawbones (the real ones, which had been placed there in 1709, eventually rotted away and had to be replaced in 2005). Beyond all that is the sea, a bluey-grey sliver. There are some great beaches on the East Lothian coast, from the massive dunes of Gullane to the gentler pleasures of Tyninghame, and some wonderful little villages like Athelstaneford, which sounds like something from the Domesday Book, and traditional towns like North Berwick and Dunbar, both solid and stoney and built to withstand the rigours of North-Sea winds.

The Wray family has owned Blinkboony Wood since 2002, but they only began to take a few tents in 2007 and it remains something of a sideline. Steve Wray is a man of many parts. He grows his own lavender, which keeps the local bees happy, and has a small workshop where he runs classes in such exotica as charcoal making and bird-box building. Around the back is the compost toilet and a marvellous vernacular greenhouse he built himself.

All of which leaves you in absolutely no doubt that this is a site for purists, a real back-to-nature adventure with limited home comforts. There’s the compost toilet and that’s about it: no showers, no running water and no electricity. Just you and the trees, the birds and the bees.