Glamping

What better, on a mild October weekend, than to up sticks from the city and congregate with a wonderful bunch of ladies in the heart of the beautiful Surrey Hills. We descended on Surrey Hill Yurts, set on the edge of the woodland with views over the valley, to celebrate the hen do of our lovely friend Anneke. We filled two large 30 foot yurts and had a fabulous weekend filled with fresh air, campfires, welly boots, gems, glitter and flower crowns, girly chats, spiced drinks, home cooked food and long hikes. Fabulous stuff!

The beautiful setting for our adventure. The yurts felt a little bit like hobbit houses, just for normal sized people! I love how they blend so easily into the landscape and the morning mist. Once inside they are spacious but snug, beautifully decked out with wooden furniture and a log burner each!

On the inside of the yurt, you can see the craftsmanship that has gone into their creation. So so beautiful! Over the weekend we deliberated long and hard how we could acquire one of our own as a weekend retreat...

LOVED the size of this ginormous handmade bed, isn't it fantastic?! And doesn't it make the girls look teensy tiny, almost hobbit sized tucked up all cosily in there? And yes, that might be a bed pan tucked under the left corner...well you know...when it's dark and cold outside...

As well as being a spot for weekend retreats, Surrey Hills Yurts is also a working farm. There were at least two separate litters of piglets squeaking and squealing away in their pens. I  fell in love with them all and spent faaaar too long sitting with them and snapping away with my camera. Lucky for you I've whittled them down to these two favourite snaps (I figured a whole post of piglets might be a little more than most people's tolerance levels!). And lucky for them then get to munch on such yummy green looking grass and with plenty of space to run and play.

Certainly made the bacon butties at breakfast a little harder to swallow, I'll be honest.

The chickens roamed the field and seemed most content to huddle up against the compost loos! I'm guessing there was a certain natural warmth emanating from in there somewhere!

These are the compost loos, if you can imagine?! They were fabulous - made almost entirely of raw sawn wood panels and with lots of vintage finishing touches such as this huge old basin, stained glass windows and vintage mirrors. Not quite the sort of camping I'm used to in the French municipal camping sites of my childhood - those dreaded holes in the floor!!

So, there we are. How far we've come! So it only remains for me to say the biggest thank you to Surrey Hills Yurts for having us and all the lovely hens for making it such a treat of a weekend. I'll share a follow-up post with a few of the antics we got up to in the next couple of days, so check back!