Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm is set on a Lake District campsite. I thought I’d share with you some of my own camping adventures – and misadventures!

Fire, Wind and Water.

None of the above are exactly what you want to encounter in a campsite. I have to say that over the years, I’ve experienced all three. Sometimes I wonder why I still own a tent!

Fire

I have experienced fire on a campsite twice, luckily both times I wasn’t too close to the conflagration.

Both times were when I was a member of the Sealed Knot re-enactment society, recreating English Civil War battles. I never progressed as far as owning one of the amazing authentic tents that you see on display (they’re very, very expensive, and rather heavy too.)

Both times, I was in the ‘plastic camp’, away from the public view, where most of the re-enactors camped. Our sites tended to be more like festival campsites than a historical camping experience.

The first event (I think it was at Witney in Oxfordshire) took place on a farmer’s field, where a crop had recently been harvested, and the field was stubble – ploughed mud with the dry stalks of wheat which had been left behind. It’s really unpleasant to camp on; muddy if it rains and really spiky and stony underfoot. And do you remember what, in the old days, farmers used to do to clear stubble from fields? It seems that the organisers of the event didn’t know.

Yes, they used to burn the stubble to clear the field.

So, there are several hundred re-enactors on the field, about a third of them are carrying muskets, and there are a dozen or so cannons. There’s a lot of black powder about. With a shout of ‘Have a care!’ the battle begins, and one of the big cannons is fired. The burning wadding from the cannon’s mouth falls to the field, and we all watch in horror as the stubble smokes, then catches light. A wave of flame races across the field. Those who can try to extinguish the fire, but lots of the participants are carrying black powder weapons and the last thing you want to do when you’re carrying a flask of gunpowder is walk into a grass fire. So we watch, helplessly.

Soon, the carpark is on fire. There are rumours that the car-park blaze began separately from an overheated catalytic convertor amongst the cars, but whatever the cause, several cars were burnt out. This was terrible, and several people were injured, but in some ways we were lucky. If the wind had blown the other way it would have taken the flames straight into the ‘plastic camp’ which was full of the non-participant partners and children of those on the field, and a lot of highly combustible camping equipment. Lives would possibly have been lost, and some of them could have been children.

The fire was soon extinguished – the fire brigade arrived, the event was cancelled and the Sealed Knot never staged a battle on a stubble field again …

But the fear of what might have happened never left me. A couple of years later on another Sealed Knot event in Devon I heard someone shouting ‘Fire’. It was the middle of the day, and most people were still arriving and setting up their tents; I’d just finished mine and I suspect I was having a quiet cup of tea. I came out of my tent, nervous, to see smoke from an area about fifty metres away. Our fire precautions had improved since Witney – there were now breaks between areas on big campsites, and minimum distances between tents, but it was still quite a crowded campsite.

It seems that the owners of a big frame tent had arrived early, set up their tent and gone out for the day, leaving their gas-powered fridge happily cooling their beer for the evening. That is, until something went wrong with the gas-powered fridge, and it set fire to the tent wall. Thankfully, it had been spotted quickly, the tent must have been treated to make it fire-retardant, and one of the first people on the scene was an ex-soldier who knew exactly what to do. He and a couple of others removed the gas bottle and tackled the fire, and the rest of us were told to collapse the tent to minimise the risk of the fire spreading if the whole thing went up. Luckily it didn’t. The fire was quickly extinguished, and all the real harm done was the terminal overheating of a few cans of beer.

In the final scenes of Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm the wind is high, and sparks from the campfire start to drift dangerously close to Amy’s tent, but I couldn’t bear to see her tent (or Matt’s beautiful red-and-white camper van) destroyed by fire. I transferred my own fear of fire on a campsite to Matt, and he very sensibly puts out the campfire before anything can go wrong. However, even though it doesn’t catch fire, Amy’s tent doesn’t last the night …