Guests Rate Mud-Bound Rural Camping Experience Highlight Of The Year

A multi-day rural camping break that this year offered guests sustained rainfall, waterlogged ground and queues described by several attendees as "longer than the headline acts" has once again been rated, by the same attendees, as the highlight of their year.

The site, a working farm repurposed for the occasion, accommodated a temporary population larger than several towns. Guests arrived by road, parked in fields, and walked the remaining distance carrying everything they would need across terrain that organisers concede had begun to deteriorate before the first night.

By the second day, conditions described in the welcome literature as "festival camping" had been recharacterised by guests as "ankle-deep," then "knee-deep," then simply "the situation." Footwear was lost. Tents were relocated, in some cases without their occupants' consent, by the gradual movement of the ground beneath them.

Welfare provision was available but, attendees report, intermittent. Sanitary facilities required commitment. Drinking water involved a walk. The on-site shops sold out of waterproof items by an hour that several guests were able to recall with precision.

Asked, on departure, to rate the experience, a clear majority described it as the best few days of their year. Many had already committed to returning.

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Guest Reviews On Arrival Home

Best holiday of my life, would not change a single thing, currently being treated for trench foot

This was a five-star break and anyone telling you otherwise was simply not there in the right spirit.

We arrived to find the field had become a different field. The car was somewhere behind us. We could not see it. That was fine. We would deal with the car later. The car, I will say now, is still there.

I lost a boot on the first evening crossing what I had assumed was a path. The boot is gone. I do not resent the boot for leaving. The mud took it as payment and I respect that.

The queues were extraordinary. I queued for water. I queued for the facilities. I queued, on one occasion, for a queue that turned out to lead to a different queue, and I have to say the people in that queue were some of the warmest I have ever met. We are still in touch.

The food ran out, then the dry clothing ran out, then a general feeling of optimism ran out, and yet somehow morale held. We sang. I am not sure what we sang. It was raining too hard to hear.

People keep asking if I had a terrible time. I did not. I had the time of my life. I have been home four days and I am already counting down to next year, where I fully expect it to be worse, and I cannot wait.

I have, I should mention, lost the car.

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Hospitality Review

DT

From a loss adjustment standpoint this is one of the more unusual case files we see, because every claimant reports total satisfaction alongside the total loss of their possessions. They have lost the tent, the bedding, the footwear, in one instance the vehicle, and they describe all of it as the best weekend of the year. There is no fraud here. The valuation simply does not behave the way valuations are supposed to.

The experience is unusual within the wider hospitality sector in that guests are routinely deprived of shelter, dryness, sleep and footing, and routinely rate the stay above breaks where all four were provided.

SC

My only observation is for those guests who carried the mud home in the vehicle and across the threshold. A festival of this kind generates a clay-and-organic compound that, once worked into a domestic carpet, is effectively permanent. I have seen hallways that never recovered. Whatever the guest felt the experience was worth, the carpet did not consent to it.

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The Transport Question

GP

The recurring failure here is the final mile. Guests are deposited at a road, abandon a vehicle in a field, and then attempt to move themselves and their entire household across saturated ground on foot — and they are surprised it does not go well. A dedicated rail link with a covered platform delivers passengers dry, in order, and crucially without a vehicle they then cannot locate. The field would never have happened on a properly scheduled service.

T

I think the mud is the point. You go for the bands and you come back for the mud. Nobody tells the story about the dry year.

Trevor declined to expand on which year was the dry year, and appeared unsure one had occurred.

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Spectator Forum

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Community Poll

Community Poll

Latest reader breakdown

Would you return to the mud field next year?

Already bought a ticket41%

Only if it is dry, which it will not be23%

No, and I say this every year before going again28%

I never left8%