Free Camping in Wales
I haven’t done much free camping in England. It’s a bit tricky trying to find somewhere suitable and I’ve been asked to move quite a lot. However, I’m determined to find somewhere before I head off to mainland Europe again. I mean, campsites are no fun, are they?
With this in mind me and my mate Thom headed to Wales for the weekend. It’s a bit more wild than England and has some incredible mountain ranges so we thought it seemed like a good choice for some free camping.
We found a nice looking spot by the small town of Merthyr Tydfil , right next to a reservoir.
It was late at night when we arrived and was cloudy and dark. We had absolutely no phone signal and the satnav couldn’t even connect to a GPS satellite. This was the kind of wild we were looking for. We were on our own.
We drove around for quite a while and had to navigate a terrifying hairpin. I mean, really, really steep, at one point I thought the van might tip over! Nothing we saw looked promising but we kept the faith and eventually drove past a small, gravel car park. At the bottom there was a nice little nook underneath a tree which looked like a good spot to camp so we stopped for the night.
In the morning we were greeted by an epic view of the reservoir and surrounding hills and were lucky enough to be parked on a little path down to the water. The gods of free camping had been kind!
We had a quick breakfast and headed off down the rocky path to the reservoir below.
We walked through a small forest
Past an old letter box
And alongside the reservoir, next to a train track.
The lake was beautifully quiet and still, there was hardly anyone else around. The morning mist hung in the air and the Brecon Beacons rose up out of the surrounding forest in the distance.
That evening we had a fire. The little nook that we camped in sheltered us from the wind and kept us out of view from the road nearby. I couldn’t believe we hadn’t been asked to move. Was really nice to do this in the UK, sometimes we forget what’s on our own doorstep!
