Canopy & Stars - Luxury Camping
(Sometimes it can be easy being green!)
Luxurious camping is growing in popularity and is a real breath of fresh air in a holiday industry that has been slow to react to the challenges presented by climate change.
The ideal is to holiday in a sustainable and eco-friendly manner such as camping, but to have a little bit of comfort while you're there. Anyone who has ever wrestled with flapping canvas in high winds, or washed in a bucket of cold water, will know that sometimes you want to come in from the great outdoors. What's more, in the wake of the economic crisis and the recent chaos of the volcanic ash cloud, there is growing demand for holidays that are low impact, in every sense.
So, Alastair Sawday Publishing - publisher of the Special Places to Stay series of guide books and winner of the Green Publisher of the Year award - has developed Canopy & Stars, a web-based business designed to find and promote the most inspiring and sustainable living spaces. The collection so far is an eclectic range: from a replica Iron Age roundhouse to a hand-made wagon, via yurts, treehouses and more. Sawday's has always been environmentally aware, but the project came out of Alastair's lifelong love of treehouses and camping. He wanted to recreate that childhood excitement for others. Camping of this unusual kind could do the trick while nailing the myth that going green means going without.
'Sustainable', of course, means more than just offering alternatives to flying and fancy hotels. The Travel Foundation, working with communities in the Third World, shows us the importance of forming relationships locally. If you're working with local suppliers, using local produce and staff, you can help bind people together and get them thinking about their food, their waste and how much water and power they use. Canopy & Stars, of course, is hardly a humanitarian charity and Britain isn't the Third World, but it is as important for us to think about how we live together as it is for any country.
So we are encouraging the use of public transport, working with property owners who use local produce and recommending builders who source their materials from within the UK. At one of our places, you could dine happily for a week without eating anything from beyond five miles from where you're staying. At others you could catch, harvest and forage dinner and then cook it over a fire on a bushcraft course. Such things give people a real feel for the area and are a part of what makes this sort of camping so refreshing.
It's also fun - which is half the point!
Chris Elmes
photos taken from www.canopyandstars.co.uk
30 Apr 10
