Expert Camping Gear Reviews & Guides
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
Somewhere between the third night of drizzle on the West Highland Way and the moment your pack scale reads 200 grams heavier than promised, you start to understand why sleeping bags matter more than almost anything else in your kit list. A lightweight down sleeping bag for backpacking isn’t just a nice-to-have for shaving grams … Read more
There’s a specific, sinking feeling that comes with reaching into your sleeping bag at midnight and finding damp patches where dry down used to be. If you’ve camped in Britain more than a handful of times, you already know this feeling intimately, because our weather has a habit of ignoring the forecast entirely. A sleeping … Read more
Somewhere around 2am, on a “mild” September night in the Peak District, you’ll discover exactly how good (or terrible) your sleeping bag really is. That’s the moment the down sleeping bag vs synthetic sleeping bag debate stops being theoretical and starts being personal. Both fillings will keep you warm on paper. Only one of them … Read more
Two people, one tent, and a single sleeping bag that only fits one of you — anyone who has actually done this knows the particular misery of a 3am elbow to the ribs. Zip-together sleeping bags solve that problem in the cleverest way possible: buy two compatible bags, click the zips, and you have a … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of misery that comes from camping with someone you love in two separate sleeping bags. You’re an arm’s length away, the tent’s condensation is doing its own thing on the flysheet above you, and every time you shuffle closer for warmth, a zip digs into someone’s ribs. A double sleeping … Read more