Expert Camping Gear Reviews & Guides
There’s a specific kind of misery that comes from waking up at 3am on a campsite, spine curled around a tent peg groove, realising the cold has found its way through every gap in your sleeping bag. A decent folding camp bed solves most of that in one go — it lifts you off the … Read more
Anyone who has woken up at 6am with a hip bone fused to the ground and a groundsheet full of last night’s rain knows the truth: your tent is only half the story. The other half is whatever’s underneath you, and for most first-time festival campers, that’s precisely the bit they forget to think about … Read more
An EVA foam camping mat is a closed-cell foam sleeping pad, usually backed with a thin aluminium foil layer, that sits between you and the cold, damp ground when you’re camping. It doesn’t inflate, it can’t puncture the way an air mat can, and it rolls or folds down small enough to strap to a … Read more
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