Expert Camping Gear Reviews & Guides
There’s a very specific kind of misery reserved for campers who skimped on the thing beneath them. You can have a £400 sleeping bag rated to minus fifteen, and none of it will matter if the cold ground is sucking the heat straight out of your back all night. A foam sleeping mat is the … Read more
There’s a particular kind of disappointment reserved for 2am, lying on a slowly deflating slab of PVC, wondering exactly which decision in your life led here. A queen size air bed is meant to prevent that scenario, not cause it — it’s a portable, inflatable mattress built to the roomy “queen” footprint (roughly 152cm x … Read more
Anyone who has woken up at 3am on a deflated slab of PVC, spine pressed against a tent-peg-shaped lump in the ground, understands why the double air bed for camping exists. It is the single piece of kit that decides whether your weekend under canvas feels like glamping or a fairly damp form of punishment. … Read more
There’s a particular sinking feeling that comes with waking up at 3am on a deflated air bed, spine pressed against cold ground, wondering how something that felt so plush at 10pm could betray you so completely. If you’ve been there, you already understand why choosing the right air bed for camping matters far more than … Read more
There’s a particular kind of camping argument that has nothing to do with tent pegs or who forgot the bottle opener. It happens at about 11pm, when two adults are trying to arrange themselves on mismatched sleeping mats that keep sliding apart in the middle of the night, leaving a canvas-cold gap right where a … Read more
Somewhere around the third night of a wet Cairngorms trip, most backpackers have the same 3am realisation: the sleeping bag was never the problem. The cold, hard, lumpy ground underneath it was. A lightweight self-inflating mat for backpacking solves that problem in a way few other pieces of kit can, because it does two jobs … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of misery reserved for 3am in a tent, when the ground has somehow found every single one of your pressure points and turned itself into a geological grudge against your spine. A self-inflating sleeping mat exists to solve exactly that problem, and it’s one of the few bits of camping … Read more
There’s a particular kind of chaos that descends on a house the night before a school residential — trainers hunting each other under the bed, a kit list photocopied so many times it’s gone grey, and somewhere in the middle of it all, a sleeping bag that either isn’t warm enough, doesn’t fit in the … Read more
Nobody warns you about this bit of parenting: the moment your five-year-old refuses to sleep anywhere that doesn’t have a cartoon dog’s face on it. Welcome to the wonderful, slightly chaotic world of the character sleeping bag for kids — the small, zip-up piece of fabric that somehow decides whether your festival weekend, camping trip, … Read more
Right, let’s be honest about something first: buying a kids sleeping bag is rarely as simple as buying one for yourself. You know your own sleep habits. You know what “three-season” means to your own bones. But a child’s sleeping bag has to cope with a wriggling seven-year-old who somehow ends up sideways by 2am, … Read more