Glamping is a term coined by someone to express glamour camping at something like the Glastonbury festival, and has been adopted as a general name for any luxury camping. So invited to have a look at the Swinton Bivouac collection of yurts and shacks I paused… It is over 30 years since I toured the French vineyards with a tent. Sleeping on a blow up bed is one of the joys of youth I have no intention of ‘enjoying’ in my later years.Reassured that I would have a proper bed, and promised a night in the gorgeous Swinton Park Hotel as well (Review coming soon), I decided to drive up to Yorkshire. The promise of landscape, Wensleydale cheese and black puddings almost as good as those from Bury also, I freely admit, weighed the scales in favour.
The county has red spotted houses and yellow bikes scattered everywhere from some minor sporting event that had been going on, but the generally quiet roads and luscious countryside, pretty towns and villages all made the journey worthwhile. I was also told I’d being staying in a ‘shack’ not a yurt, which sounded like a good plan too. Of course Yorkshire folk say they live in Gods’ Own County, but I’m from Lancashire, so I take that with a huge pinch of salt. They are not far wrong though, Yorkshire is beautiful.
Yurts and shack are positioned to maximise the views, clustered loosely around an old farmhouse and outbuildings which have been well converted into the restaurant, shop and toilet/wash-room block for what is in part a camp-site, the tents being the glamorous yurts. Yurts are a much more impressive structure than most tents, although tented camps these days are very luxurious and hybrids abound in the ‘green’ hotel community, such as those in Namibia or South Africa.
