Over the past few months Covid-19 restrictions have eased and I have been able to use my hot tent to continue exploring the Highlands.  As anyone who has read my books and blogs will know I have a passion for visiting the remote parts of the Highlands of Scotland and I’m particularly fond of staying in bothies. Sadly since March of last year the restrictions due to the pandemic have meant that highland bothies have been closed. Over this year I’ve been seeking to find an alternative method for spending time in remote places and I have been using my hot tent as a way of finding out how to enjoy the Highlands in all seasons and in all weathers.

Here are some of the videos I’ve taken all of my recent adventures and an early review of my Safir 7 hot tent from Tentipi.

A hot tent is a very different concept from the type of camping I’ve been used to in the past. Over the last 30 years or so lightweight nylon tents have become the preference for outdoor enthusiasts. There are some fantastic tents on the market now that allow you to backpack into remote country and to camp there. This means you can explore places that would otherwise be impossible and the lightweight tent has freed up many outdoor pursuits enthusiasts in a way that has dramatically increased their range.

Despite their obvious advantages it is, however, the case that lightweight tents have limitations. This is particularly evident during the winter months. Here in the far north during the winter daylight hours can be very short and if you’re camping in a remote area you will find yourself confined to the small space of a tent for many hours when you wait for the sun to come up in the morning.  Trying to keep yourself occupied in a small tent mean laying in your sleeping bag trying to read from you phone.  In my experience that always means your elbows or your shoulders get pins and needles and I spend my time shifting from one elbow  to the other trying to get comfortable. Coupled with that you would almost certainly have to endure the extremes of weather from heavy rain to very cold conditions. In my experience it’s quite possible to enjoy these conditions in a lightweight tent for a short period but if you’re doing that for any length of time the experience can be challenging.

For this reason I have spent many years exploring the Highlands spending my time in the many mountain bothies but exist in remote locations. These remote shelters allow me to carry in coal and keep warm in front of a fire enjoying the luxury of a chair to sit in on the long winter nights. My ability to use these bothies has now, of course, being severely restricted and indeed we don’t know whether we will ever be able to return to using bothies in the way we could before. Because of this I began to look around for an alternative math method of spending nights in remote locations. In short I was looking for a mobile bothy.

The obvious alternative is a camper van. To be honest I don’t really see myself as someone who would be comfortable in one of these gadget filled plastic monoliths. Whilst these vehicles are fantastic in many ways and give a lot of people a huge amount of pleasure allowing them to be comfortable and to enjoy travelling to remote places they do have some limitations. Not the least of these is of course the price which can be many thousands of pounds but there is also a sort of aesthetic quality to these travelling homes which means that you take most of the conveniences of modern living with you. For many folk that’s quite an attractive thing but for me, I like my journeys in the outdoors to take me somewhere that is very different from where I would live normally. For that reason I just don’t think I’d feel comfortable in a mobile home or a camper van.

For some time I began to think about the possibility of using a hot tent. What, to be honest, I couldn’t really see how these things could work. It just didn’t seem to make sense to me that you could have a wood burning stove and a canvas construction.  One weekend when I was camping on the West Coast of Scotland and my nylon tent was being thrown about by the high winds I encountered an older couple camping in one of Tentipis’ hot tents, a Safir 7.  They told me that they had spent literally hundreds of nights all over the country in all kinds of conditions. They had travelled to Europe and taken their tent beyond the Arctic Circle. That tent had very obviously withstood all of the challenges that such a journey could throw at it and, when I glimpsed inside, it was very obvious just how comfortable the inside of the tent could be.

Three months later I found myself back on the West Coast of Scotland this time in my own Safir 7. It was with some trepidation that I lit the stove for the first time what was instantly converted when its warmth filled the tent and I realised that here I had a way of exploring the Highlands in all weathers. In short – I had found my mobile bothy.

Perhaps the unusual thing about a hot tent is that rather than developing new technology the hot tent is more a return to an older technology used by the nomadic peoples who travelled the harsh conditions in northern Europe. The tent is canvas rather than nylon. Like any other piece of equipment but perhaps more so because of its different nature the type of tent we have become accustomed to it takes some skill to be able to use it properly. One difference is that the heat from the stove keeps you warm, dry and comfortable in pretty much any weather.  The use of ventilation is very important in order to enable you to keep water vapour and frost out of the tent. It takes some time to learn what the tent can do but for me it’s offered I totally knew way of exploring places that I couldn’t visit before. I have always loved visiting bothies but, of , there’s one limitation.  Bothies are fixed and don’t move around.  You can take a tent to new places and that enables you to go to places you couldn’t go to before. Over the coming months I’m going to be sharing my adventures in my hot tent with you and here are just a couple of videos that I’ve shot and also a little introduction to my latest book, wild winter.

I do hope you’ve enjoyed this short blog and do feel free to contact me with any questions you might have about well it’s like using a hot tent in the Highlands. I will be more than happy to try and answer any questions you have.

Enjoy your wanderings and treat every new day as an adventure.