Family Camping In The Chilterns During Our Stay In Britain By Tony Lucas At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

It’s a tradition in our family that we go camping in the first week of July. The main reason is to try and hold our various family members together for as long as possible by meeting at least once a year.

You will need to know that we are a large family and that we all live in various parts of Britain and abroad. I was one of nine children and we have all married (sometimes more than once) and we all have children and some of those now have children too and it is great to have three generations of one family all enjoying themselves in this lovely part of the World. So when I say the family goes camping I mean about 40 strong most years and we come from all over to stay in Britain and as many of us as possible always make the effort.

We have a special arrangement with a campsite called White Mark Hills Camp site which is near Watlington, just off the M40 at Junction 6 and deep in the Chilterns. This is red kite country and these lovely birds can be seen flying everywhere in the updrafts all over the Chilterns and often even from the M40 which runs parallel to the Chiltern Hills.

The owner of the site sets aside a field for the family invasion every year. Its not that we are particularly disruptive, but 40 odd people of ages ranging from 4 to 65, inevitably make a bit of noise and need a lot of space, so we have a large field to ourselves set away from the other campers and under the steep side of the hill behind the camping site, with the ancient Icknield Way running behind us along the fields edge, just behind the boundary hedge.

We spend our days enjoying the wonderful countryside and wandering through the lovely villages and the hills, looking at the wild orchids that bloom sometimes in great numbers on the chalk hills and in the evening we bar-b-q, drink wine and beer and tell a lot of jokes. In one of the villages there is a pub called the Plough Inn (all the village pubs seem to be called the Plough In for some reason) that till a few years ago, still served Brakespears real ale from a galvanised pitcher that the landlady brought up from the cellar every time we ordered. It was wonderfully fresh and cool. Great beer but sadly the brewery “modernised” it and both the landlady and the atmosphere have gone. Now it has a bistro restaurant instead and is the worse for it. The hills and land are very unspoilt and we have seen glow worms most years in these fields and the bats that fly across the hills here are not your common or garden pipistrels, these are big bats, probably horseshoe bats.

The site has all the facilities you could want – toilets, showers, wash facilities, an on-site shop and facilities for motor homes – electric and water hook ups, hard pitches etc. This is a well provisioned, clean and thoughtful site, set in a beautiful position on a hill overlooking the River Thames valley. A site we would highly recommend to any campers.

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