The Lake District spent the summer under patrol. Rangers in hi-vis. Police handing out fines. Photographs of abandoned tents and scorched turf recycled in every local paper. The Peak and Snowdonia/Eryri fared no better: disposable barbecues smouldering, saplings hacked down, glass strewn across pasture. For anyone who works the land, none of it was news. The only surprise was that the heaps had grown too large for the authorities to ignore.
Commentators reached for a distinction. This, they said, was not “wild camping” but “fly camping.” Wild is noble, discreet, respectable. Fly is feral, noisy, destructive. Draw the line and the good name of wild camping might be saved.
The difficulty is that the line is more tribal than legal. Across almost all of England and Wales, both wild and fly camping are unlawful without landowner consent. The difference lies not in statute but in the eye of the beholder. What the outdoor tribe approves of is “wild”; what it disapproves of is “fly.” Behaviour matters, of course – but to imagine a neat division between saints and sinners is to indulge in self-comfort.
A Hobby of Its Own
Wild camping has shifted. It is no longer just a way of staying close to the hills; it has become a pastime in itself. Where once a bivvy was the consequence of a long day’s walk, now it is the goal. Facebook groups trade grid references. YouTube channels compare tents. Instagram reels show lofty camps above misty valleys – without the background whine of the drone filming them.
The real prize is less the night itself than the audience the next morning. Likes, clicks and comments drive the habit as much as the scenery. The hills are no longer simply climbed; they are consumed, documented and shared. They have become stages for content, presented as tame “remote wilderness” neatly framed for the 9:16 crop of a phone screen.
The culture now rewards visibility, not quietness. The point is to prove you were there – week after week, with the latest bargain from Amazon or Alpkit
Education works on the willing, or at least on those who stand to gain from it. It has no purchase on the atomised individual who values his own performance of freedom above any wider responsibility.
Social Media Has Created a Social Licence
This helps explain why the numbers have swelled so suddenly: social media has created a kind of licence. Watch enough reels of tents pitched by a tarn and the act begins to look legitimate. Permission is conferred by precedent they camped there, they lit that fire, now it’s your turn.
The result is predictable friction. Farmers and rangers remind people that camping is not permitted. Campers point to their phones and reply, in effect, “But everyone’s doing it.” The law speaks one way, the algorithm another. And when a land manager asks a trespasser to move on, it is seen not as a matter of stewardship but as an attempt to snatch away a promised freedom.
Ray Mears and Foreigners
Like so many modern problems, the blame lies somewhere in the Venn diagram of Ray Mears and foreigners.
Generations grew up on television adventure programmes in the 1990s and 2000s, where the campfire was a symbol of self-reliance and the British countryside – shaped and managed for millennia – was recast as untouched wilderness.
Then came the flood of North American online content, built on the assumption that vast tracts of public land guaranteed the “right” to sleep out. Put the two together and you end up with the belief that camping outdoors is not only legitimate but almost a duty – an expression of personal freedom that feels increasingly rare in modern Britain.
What began as educational became inspirational, then aspirational. During the COVID lockdowns, with the country confined at home, YouTube offered a substitute wilderness. Outdoor content soared in popularity. One moment you could watch police drones chasing down dog-walkers; the next, Luke Nichols exploring the endless backcountry of Alaska. When the restrictions lifted, it was no surprise to see a surge of interest in all things outdoors – especially activities that seemed to promise freedom, and a brief escape from control.
The Cheapness of it All
The practical barriers have collapsed. Once, camping in the hills demanded investment in equipment and a degree of knowledge. Now a tent from Temu or Decathlon and a twelve-pound stove from Amazon will suffice. Entire kit lists circulate online, complete with links to the cheapest supplier. The sums are so small that if the hangover bites the next morning, many simply walk away and leave it all behind. The festival model has reached the fells.
The same internet that supplies the kit also provides the maps. Where once you needed experience, now a stranger’s pinned location is enough. Which makes the surge of tents beside lakes and on moorland verges not surprising, but inevitable.
Too much information, too quickly
That flood of information brings immediacy of return. Open Instagram or TikTok on a Tuesday afternoon and by Friday night you can be camped beside a remote tarn or llyn. Kit lists, grid references, routes — even advice on how best to film it all for the feed.
Twenty years ago it would have been unthinkably harder. You might have needed a stack of Trail or TGO magazines, hours lurking on the UKClimbing forums, or a well-thumbed copy of The Book of the Bivvy for inspiration. That extra effort acted as a filter. If you stumbled across someone camped in the Carneddau or the Howgills, you knew they had at least put in the work to get there.
A Broken Contract
For decades, wild camping in England and Wales rested on a kind of social contract. Camp high, leave no trace, go quietly. In return, landowners and managers looked the other way. It was never legal, but it was tolerated – largely because the landowner rarely knew of the camper’s fleeting presence at all.
That arrangement worked because it depended on restraint. A camper might have claimed the “freedom” to pitch a tent anywhere, but they chose not to exercise it crudely. The right was unspoken, and so was the responsibility.
What we see now is not only the erosion of that contract but a reflection of something wider. In a culture that prizes self-expression above duty, the figure on the fell is no longer a member of a community bound by shared norms. He is the atomised individual of the 2020s, convinced that his own freedom is paramount, suspicious of any obligation to others.
The result is a countryside that mirrors the broader decay of civic life: trust collapses, unwritten rules lose their force, and personal gratification trumps collective responsibility. The fells, like much else, are no longer a commons in the moral sense. They are an arena for competing freedoms, each exercised without regard for what came before or what comes after.
The Naïve Optimism of Education
Faced with the mess, outdoor organisations have doubled down on the mantra that “education is the key.” National Parks issue codes of conduct, quietly acknowledging the illegality of wild camping while publishing pages on how to do it. Their approach is management rather than admonishment – gently nudging visitors towards campsites where possible.
The British Mountaineering Council takes a different tack. As a membership organisation, it is natural for them to campaign for more access, more places for their members to play. One of their flagship efforts is Respect The Wild, essentially a series of short films full of language nobody could object to: “respect,” “responsibly,” “sustainably.” But note how the harms described are almost all framed in human terms – litter, noise, light, contaminated water. Habitat disturbance, wildlife pressure, ecological cost rarely make the list. Leave No Trace has been reframed as Leave No Trace For Other Humans To Notice.
These education efforts are well-intentioned and even necessary, but they preach to an echo chamber. The people who read the codes weren’t the problem to begin with, and those who cause the issues don’t even know the BMC exists.
The assumption is always that poor behaviour stems from ignorance: if only people knew their campfire was harmful, they would instantly change. Friends of mine cling to this belief, convinced that with the right film or earnest conversation they can win everyone over.
The error is simple. The people fly-camping by the lakeside are not misinformed; they are indifferent. Education works on the willing, or at least on those who stand to gain from it. It has no purchase on the atomised individual who values his own performance of freedom above any wider responsibility. For him, the lesson is not an invitation but a restraint – and in the moral climate of today, restraints are there to be shrugged off.
Access and Its Consequences
This is the point where some campaigners start to shift uneasily. Organisations that demanded greater access now find themselves facing the costs of it. The refrain is still that “education is the key,” but the evidence scattered across lay-bys and lakesides suggests otherwise.
The more strident voices – the professional trespassers and true believers – cling to something more ideological. Their campaign was never only about personal freedom. It was about seizing the means of outdoor recreation: a redistribution of land ownership and use as much as land access. That explains the reluctance to acknowledge the damage. To do so would be to admit that the freedoms they fought for have consequences that cannot be swept neatly away.
The truth is closer to free speech than to socialism. Grant ultimate freedom and you must live with the results. Give everyone a voice and you will hear what you despise. Give everyone access and you will see behaviour you deplore. One is as inevitable as the other.
Dartmoor’s Hollow Triumph
The irony of this summer’s fly-camping rows is that they came hard on the heels of a celebrated legal victory. Earlier this year the Supreme Court overturned a private landowner’s challenge on Dartmoor, ruling that camping formed part of the “open-air recreation” permitted on common land. For campaigners it was a moment of triumph: the only place in England where wild camping had statutory footing was secured, carrying with it the symbolism of a wider right to roam.
But the celebrations were always going to be short-lived. As soon as the judgment was handed down, Dartmoor saw a surge in tents – fuelled as much by publicity as by principle. Many were pitched responsibly, but many more were not. Fires scarred the peat, litter piled up in gateways, and farmers and conservationists alike found themselves acting once again as reluctant wardens. The very case that was supposed to prove the virtue of access instead revealed the inevitability of its costs.
It is one thing to win in court, another to shape behaviour on the ground. A right written on paper does not create a shared ethic of responsibility. It merely opens the gate wider and assumes that those who pour through will behave – an assumption that, on Dartmoor as in the Lakes, has already been shown to be fragile at best.
Scotland Isn’t a Paradise
Scotland is often held up as the counterexample. The Land Reform Act gives a statutory right to wild camp, provided it is done responsibly. Yet the fringes of Loch Lomond, Loch Ness and the NC500 route tell a different story: crowds, litter, antisocial behaviour. Chemical toilets emptied into verges, fires smouldering in peat, and the papier-mâché of toilet paper scattered among ancient pines.
The law may be different, but human nature is not. Wherever access is easy, the same problems follow, just as they do in popular outdoor destinations the world over. The Scottish Outdoor Access Code is often pointed to as the model for managing this freedom – but a code is only effective if people are willing to follow it. If the visitor’s reference point is not the code but the influencer who camped there before them, then what?
A Skill, Not a Free-For-All
I should declare an interest. Wild camping was part of my Mountain Leader award, one of the first outdoor qualifications I undertook two decades ago. To pass, you must camp repeatedly in the hills, carrying everything you need, well away from roads and comforts. It is about more than enduring a rough night. It is about managing yourself – and sometimes a group – responsibly in remote terrain, leaving no trace, moving lightly through the landscape.
That award, created in 1964, sits at the foundation of all professional mountaineering and guiding qualifications in Britain. Proficiency in mountain camping is a core requirement: small groups, tents pitched at dusk, no trace left by dawn beyond a patch of flattened grass. That is the tradition worth defending.
But it bears little resemblance to what we have seen this summer. A bivvy high on a col, gone before sunrise, is not the same act as a roadside gathering with music and bottles. To conflate them under one label is to miss the point – yet in practice they bleed into one another, and the damage of the latter increasingly defines the perception of the former.
Inevitable Outcomes
The lesson of this summer is not that something has gone wrong, but that events have unfolded exactly as expected. Sell the countryside as a stage for individual freedom and people will act out that freedom in ways you may not like.
For decades, the national parks have been promoted as recreational playgrounds. Outdoor brands and influencers have filled screens with curated images of camping as a rite of passage. Social media has amplified it to a scale no authority can hope to match. To believe that this would end with universal responsibility and quiet respect was fantasy.
These outcomes are not the fault of a few bad apples. They are the downstream consequence of a culture that prizes self-expression over duty and gratification over restraint. Once the culture shifts, behaviour follows – and no number of leaflets or videos can reverse it.
Yet the official response is always the same: education. If only people knew better, they would surely do better. But education cannot repair a culture that no longer recognises obligation. To try is to mistake indifference for ignorance.
Where Next?
The question now is what balance we are prepared to strike. Wild camping done well can sit alongside land management, but only if the unspoken contract of discretion and care is honoured. Fly camping has already stretched that contract close to breaking. If it snaps, the loss will not just fall on the feral campers. It will be felt by the quiet bivvy-baggers too.
The countryside is not a blank canvas, nor a backdrop for curated reels. It is a lived-in, worked-over landscape, every acre belonging to someone. Yet modern culture treats it as a common resource to be consumed at will – a set of shared riches we feel entitled to exhaust. Any call for restraint is recast as an attack on freedom, because restraint no longer sits easily in a society built around the detached self.
If there is a lesson in all this, it is that outcomes follow culture, not codes. You cannot educate people back into responsibility when the wider culture tells them that visibility is virtue and freedom is absolute. Until that changes, the contract will continue to fray.
And perhaps, when the most accessible places have been trashed beyond fashion, the pendulum will swing. When it is no longer cool to showcase a night in the hills for the algorithm, the slopes may again be left to those who seek only a quiet night under the stars.
