Why the Uplands Need Us to Tread Softly

Britain's high ground is tougher than it looks and far more fragile than it feels. The arctic-alpine plants clinging to a Snowdonia ledge or a Cairngorm plateau may be centuries old, growing a few millimetres a year in a season that lasts barely three months. Peat hags, moss carpets, lichen-crusted boulders and dwarf willow all recover painfully slowly from a single night's boot prints or a scorched patch of turf. Add ground-nesting birds such as golden plover, curlew and dotterel, plus the red deer and mountain hares that use these spaces as refuge, and it becomes clear that wild camping is a privilege extended to us by the landscape, not a right to trample it.

Leave No Trace is not about being joyless. It is about keeping the hills wild enough that the next walker, the next swimmer and the next generation of wildlife get the same experience you came for.

Pitch Late, Leave Early

The single most effective habit is timing. Arrive as the light is going, sleep, and be gone before most people have finished their first brew. Pitching late means you choose a spot in low light with a purpose, rather than sprawling across the best-loved ground at teatime and staying put for two days. Leaving early means your tent is not a landmark, and any flattened grass has the full day and a bit of dew to spring back.

• Eat your main meal before you arrive, or take something cold that needs no stove and no lingering.
• Pack so you can pitch in ten minutes — inner, fly, pegs, done — without sweeping a headtorch beam across half the valley.
• One night only in any one spot. Two nights in the same place doubles the damage and turns a temporary footprint into a scar.
• If you are walking a long route, move on properly each day. Do not leave kit, food or a stash behind to mark your territory.

Choose Ground That Can Take It

Some surfaces shrug off a tent; others bruise for years. Aim for bare rock, gravel, shingle, or grass that is already short and worn. Before you peg out, look down and identify what you are about to flatten. Moss, lichen, bilberry, crowberry, cushion-forming alpines and the soft turf of a summit plateau are all off limits if there is any alternative.

Keep well away from water — at least 50 metres, more if the ground is boggy — so nothing you do reaches the tarn or stream that others drink from. Avoid pitching on obvious animal tracks, at the mouth of a gully where drainage concentrates, or on the eroded edges of existing paths. If the ground is already bare and compacted, that is often the best place for you, not the worst: repeated use of one sacrificial spot is kinder than scattering fresh impacts across pristine vegetation.

Everything You Carry In, You Carry Out

There is no bin at the top of a pass, and burying rubbish is just hiding it for someone else to find.

• Toilets: walk at least 50 metres from water, paths and camping spots, dig a hole roughly 20 centimetres deep in living soil, do your business, and cover it well. Carry out the paper in a sealed bag — burning it in a dry upland is a genuine fire risk, and burying it simply litters the hills with blue plastic for years.
• Wet wipes and tea bags: neither breaks down in the way you hope. Take a small resealable bag and treat it as part of your kit.
• Food waste: orange peel, apple cores and nut shells are not native and can take years to rot in cold upland soil. If it does not belong there, it comes home.
• Spare pegs, guyline offcuts, tent pole bungs and paracord fragments are the most common things left behind. Do a slow, deliberate sweep of your pitch before you go.

Washing, Swimming and Upland Water

Wild swimming in a hill tarn at dawn is one of the great rewards of a wild camp, but it comes with responsibility. Enter gently, avoid trampling soft banks and the muddy margins where amphibians and invertebrates live, and keep out of shallow gravelly areas in spring when fish may be spawning. Cold water shock is real even in summer: wade in, breathe, and swim within your limits in deep, clear water rather than plunging from a ledge you cannot see the bottom of.

For washing, use as little as possible. Even biodegradable soap is a pollutant in a fragile upland system, so carry water in a bowl or bag at least 50 metres from any stream or tarn, wash with it there, and scatter the grey water over wide ground rather than pouring it into the water. Sunscreen, insect repellent and toothpaste all end up in the water you swim in, so go sparingly and choose the minimum that works.

Stoves, Fires and Leaving It Better

Open fires have no place in British wild camping. Heather, gorse and peat burn easily and quietly, deadwood is habitat for insects and fungi, and a scorch mark in a summit lawn can last a decade. Use a stove, and use it on a rock or on ground that is already bare.

Finally, think about leaving a place better than you found it. Pick up the stray wrapper someone else dropped; note an eroded path so you can report it; take a photo and a bearing rather than building another cairn. Pack out your own kit, then glance back once more from the path. If nobody could tell you had slept there, you have camped well.