Knotlow Farm - Peak District November 2008

Knotlow farm is 6 miles East of Buxton along the A515, just outside the village of Flagg. We arrived after dark on a cold Friday night deep into a wintry Peak District November. A surprising lack of traffic meant the most exciting thing to report from the journey was Steve taking his Sat Nav too literally, and turning right exactly when it told him to. Twice. This wouldn’t normally be funny, but the last time we visited this campsite, he took the same wrong turnings down the same wrong roads for the same stupid reason.

The boring but necessary campsite details:
Tents are £5 per night.
Toilet facilities are basic but functional. The ladies get more toilets then the gents do, which I discovered after venturing into the female section… for research purposes only, you understand…
The actual site is half flat and half sloped with a good covering of grass, with room for anything up to 20 ish tents; see picture. And yes those are arrows in the bag of wood.

The site can get crowded during the summer, but when we turned up, we were the only ones there (that caravan was empty). Hardly a shock, considering the weather forecast. The two best points about the site are: campfires, and its 365 days a year opening period.

After arriving, we pitched tents with rapidly freezing hands and quickly got a fire going. Nothing interesting happened.

Saturday was cold. The forecast was for a high of 2 degrees, and a low of -2 during the day, which explains why no one else was retarded enough to be on the campsite. Being the most retarded and strange of the three of us, I got up early and spent three hours firing steel arrows across the campsite from the caravan into a bag of firewood.

At about 11:30, my fingers had started bleeding, and Steve and Tania finally emerged from their bright orange tent. Deciding what to do for the day went roughly like this:
Me: I’ll go for a walk, and you two can do whatever you want on your own.
Steve: We can go shopping in Buxton
Tania: I haven’t got any money, so I don’t want to go.
Steve: I do.
Tania: Well I don’t, I’m going with Clive.
Steve: Then I’m staying in bed.
Clive: You might as well have stayed at home. Come for a walk.
Tania: You told me you needed to get fit, Steve.
Steve: Meh. Can’t be arsed. Tania, you’re not well enough to go.
Tania: Well if I don’t go, what are we going to do?
Steve: Stay in bed.
Tania: Then I’m going.

To be fair on Steve, he did give Tania all his warm clothing and force her to take plenty of food and water (probably because he knew it was all going into my rucksack).

The idea of going on a walk was to keep warm, and get back just before dark to start the fire up. However, I ignored the fact that I have underestimated the length and difficulty of walks on 100% of occasions – but sure in the belief that this time the walk really was three hours and 8 miles long, we got going.

We walked along the valley of a river I can’t remember the name of, around a hill I can’t remember anything about, and past some people I couldn’t much care less about. The path along the river was in places submerged, something to keep in mind after heavy rains.

Despite the suggestion of this picture that Tania’s map reading landed her in nothing but deep water, we only got lost once, which is a personal best. Although this is probably down to the fact that it wasn’t me reading the map, so I can’t really call it a personal best.

Anyway, after walking through a herd of cows that got Tania screaming like, well, a girl, we reached the last leg of the walk as the night closed in. 3 hours this wasn’t. 8 miles it certainly wasn’t. As the light faded into a chilly evening, we plunged through mud, and ducked and weaved past stray thorns until we could no longer read the map. Fortunately, the path became so easy to follow that a blindfolded fruit bat in a Tescos organic shopping bag could have managed it, and so we got back to the car without losing any eyes.

Then began the Long Night of the Icy Terror. Returning to the campsite at around 6pm, the temperature gauge on Steve’s Landrover read -0.4. At this point we all exchanged worried glances. The sky was as clear as an Alcohol rehab clinic on the 31st of December, and seeing the stars wasn’t enough to brighten our prospects of living through the night.

Soon enough we had the fire going, and Steve started making soup after about half an hour caught in a cycle of, “I’m too hungry to move to get the food, but I need the food to move.”

Seeing as we had a whole night sitting by fire without the supervision of responsible adults, there was bound to be a list of immature, dangerous, pathetic and in hindsight, unfunny, events. Here is this trip's list:

The obvious one - burning our rubbish, including plenty of plastic. While this was out of laziness because the bins were almost seven metres away, the real effect was that as the fumes drifted through our thin brains, we couldn’t feel the cold quite so much.

Using £3 Tesco gloves to move wood around in the centre of the fire. The lesson here is twofold: plastic gloves melt, and the middle of the fire is hot.

Using a long stick of kindling as a handle to slide inside the hollow part of a slow burning log (one that is alight), and running around the campsite shouting that you have the Olympic torch in your hands.

Taking off socks, and holding them over the fire to see how much steam comes off them. This was done to dry the socks, and not because me and Steve are actually six year old children.

Placing a glass bottle of Bulmers cider on the fire on my side – three feet from my face - “to see if it will explode.” Well, Steve, it bloody well does, and I still have the cuts on my hands from where I somehow managed to shield my face at the last second. Never put glass in the fire. The other stuff we did was cotton-wool safe compared to this, and after nearly losing both eyes, we put an end to the fucking about and went and checked the Landrover’s temperature gauge.

It was only 11pm, and it was -5.4. When Steve returned from checking this, he sat by the fire and shivered for a full 3 minutes until he’d warmed up. Realising how cold it now was, we shelved plans for getting drunk due to the cooling effects of the alcohol. Steve’s water bottle, left in his tent, demonstrates just what we were up against.

Yes, that is ice, and this is after he’s tried melting it over the fire.

Just before midnight, the act of going to the toilet became an act of reckless bravery due to the risk of your urine freezing on the way out. Steve mounted one final courageous expedition to his monster truck to see the temperature before we all went to bed. The pictorial evidence is below:

If your computer is shit and can’t even load small pictures, it said -6.4… keeping in mind that the inside of a Landrover is not exposed to the wind. After swearing a lot, and bidding a last, final farewell to each other, it was time to sleep for possibly the last time.

Editor: This is where the diary entry stops, as after writing this on that cold Saturday night, the author froze to death along with his friends, and had to be extracted from his tent using a pneumatic drill the next morning. The rescue team noted the following:

“Despite the warmth of a reindeer skin, a sheepskin, and indeed a number of King sized duvets, there was no chance of survival for people as bewilderingly unintelligent and reckless as these. Upon entering the site we found the water frozen in the pipes (see picture below), and three inches of ice on one of the tents that eventually had caused the roof to collapse. We can only conclude that the casualties here were part of some sort of mentally challenged camping group, but the motivation for their apparent suicide remains unclear.”

Editor: I feel that I should point out one thing at this stage. It was either the above bullshit, or a sentence describing yet another poxy £600 Landrover breakdown on the way home. What would you have done?