The campsite

an anecdote

In September I went walking for a week in Norfolk, in Thetford Forest and down the coast. For the second night I’d booked to stay at a campsite near the sea, quite an expensive one, whose branding suggested something more like a holiday park. A sunny, clear morning had become a dark, windy, melancholic afternoon and I’d had to hurry past flocks of waders on the foreshore to get there on time. I’d not showered in two days and my phone was running out of battery, and I had begun to fantasise about all of the comforts this campsite might offer; I wondered if it might have a pizza van, perhaps even a bar.

I got there just before dusk, and found it was nothing but an empty field and a couple of container-style cabins that had come straight from a construction site – the door of one had been left open, showing a mirror over a sign saying, ‘You are looking at the person responsible for your safety’. There was otherwise a single sad bell tent flapping in the wind, obviously empty of glampers.

As I rounded the corner I also saw a campervan and I was relieved that I wasn’t going to be the only guest. But when someone came out of it, I realised that it must be the warden – he certainly didn’t look like a holidaymaker, at least the sort I’d come to expect to find in a campervan, middle-aged couples, Germans, families with young children. Two other men were hanging around between the temporary buildings. One of these, a slim cocky guy, came up to me. (The third man didn’t talk to me or look at me the whole time I was there; the oldest of the three, he seemed to do nothing but skulk silently in and around the campervan.) ‘Nigel?’ I said, the name of the man I’d been texting about the booking. No, he said, but didn’t introduce himself. He was nonetheless friendly, although I began to worry his smile was more of a smirk or a leer. Have you booked, he asked and I said yes and gave my name and said that I’d paid. He pointed out the cabin with the toilets and showers and said that unfortunately the women’s toilets weren’t working but that there was an individual toilet that was. He also said that the water wasn’t drinking water – all of it was hot, a problem that they were working to solve. He said I could pitch wherever, but suggested I go in the lee of the toilet block as it was getting quite windy.

As we walked towards the suggested pitch I suddenly sensed something unusual at the edge of my vision. I turned to see a small barn owl tethered to a metal hoop on the grass. It was the closest I’ve ever been to a barn owl, and it took me a while to grasp what I was seeing: the delicacy of the colouring and the shape of the face seemed too perfect not to be a model or a drawing or an apparition. I’ve had the same experience more recently, at Rainham, with a wild owl that I came across perched on a fencepost and I stood there, stupidly, for a few seconds, unable to understand it. This owl on the hoop bent its head and took a step to one side, its feathers ruffling in the wind, and I could see that it was real.

I was feeling confused and vaguely threatened by the three men, who did not look much like the people who usually run campsites, and so I found a pitch outside of the horseshoe of construction cabins, behind a petrol lawnmower. The lawnmower had been used at some point recently, certainly, but not regularly, and otherwise it was just a field, a farmer’s field, rough and tussocky underfoot, next to a field of horses that I was told was not part of the site. Aside from the cabins there was absolutely no shelter, no trees, nothing. I decided to shower first, then assess the situation; I was also desperate for a wee.

I went to the individual toilet and had my wee, then tried to flush. It didn’t work. I tried the tap and a tiny trickle came out. I then went to the shower cubicles and got undressed, but the same was the case there. I gave up and washed my feet and socks in the trickle of (cold) water, then went out to tell the men what I’d found. Now only the youngest was around. Ah yeah, he said, sorry, battery’s gone, but someone’s bringing a new one and it will be along in literally five minutes. We chatted briefly about where I had walked from and about the weather. He’s got the right idea, he said, and pointed to a small unfinished shelter in the middle of the three cabins. I looked over and, again taking a moment to understand what I was seeing, made out a second owl, a much larger one, huddled against the corrugated metal wall, with big red eyes that it narrowed at us as we looked over. ‘There’s two!’ I said awkwardly, and the man said proudly that they were both his, rescue owls. In fact, he said, there were twenty-four more coming the next day. He was going to start a sanctuary.

I went back to my tent and momentarily freaked out. There were no other campsites within walking distance; a few miles away there was a fairly expensive hotel. Down the road was a B&B for people with horses and I considered begging them to let me pitch my tent in a paddock. I have stayed on slightly sinister campsites before – I often walk in September, at the end of the season, and have therefore been the only guest a few times now, once, memorably, where a loud but distant party arrived at 11pm and were gone by 7 and I still can’t say that they were real and not some kind of overnight fairy gathering. But this was let’s say the dodgiest campsite I’d ever stayed at. I looked at google reviews and found everyone saying the same things – too expensive for what it was, no drinking water, nowhere to wash up, someone who had been put here as an ‘upgrade’ from another site with the same owner, which they thought bode ill for the whole endeavour. At the same time there had been a little vase of plastic flowers in the toilet, a reassuring detail. I decided to be brave and stick it out, and packed my stuff for the pub. As I left, the youngest man offered me some bottled water, but then came back empty-handed. He reassured me again that the battery was coming in five minutes.

At the pub I had an overpriced meal and a couple of pints, charged my phone, filled my bottle, did my teeth etc. I also looked up the second owl. I’d thought from its tufts it was a long-eared owl, then realised it was too large for that, and the Collins app confirmed that it had to be an eagle owl. An eagle owl! I’d never seen one, only ever heard them, once, bivouacking illicitly in a national park in the south of France. When I got back to the campsite I had a final wee. The toilet still wouldn’t flush.

I slept better than I was expecting; I could hear the men talking around a fire as I lay reading the most soothing book I had with me (Love’s Executioner by Irvin Yalom). A tawny owl called from a distant hedgerow or copse. I was woken at midnight by light rain and hurried to get in my socks which were pegged to the guy ropes; everything was quiet. In the morning I packed up and set off for the nearest flushing toilet. I passed the youngest man on the way out, the owl man as I had begun to think of him. He asked me if I’d slept well and if his (his!) tawny had woken me – she had been calling from the roof of the cabin next to me. I said I’d heard one but only very faintly. He told me he had just arrived, he had previously lived in York. He said very few places accepted his owls and it was hard to find a job, that the money here was bad but he was happy so long as he was with his owls. The other owls, the twenty-four, were staying at a different sanctuary in York, but were arriving today, as was an aviary. He said he hated that the owls were tied up and that he was just waiting for them to get used to the place then they would be flying free. He told me that when he took them down to the beach to fly them people came and marvelled. He told me that the barn owl had been rescued from someone who had been cruel to her, and that she was a baby. He told me that he’d been part of an eagle owl release scheme with David Attenborough, his hero.

It was raining lightly, as it had been since the night, and I desperately needed a wee and a coffee. But I was also fascinated by this man and wanted to find out more from him – not facts about owls, especially when I knew at least some of the things he was saying couldn’t be true, and for that reason wasn’t sure what of what he said of himself might also be a kind of fabrication or fantasy – but trying to work out his ‘deal’, what sort of person this was, whose life seemed to revolve, at least as he presented it to me, around owls.

I had never felt more of a townie, realising that these rural men were of a type that I’d never really encountered, and not really being sure how to understand them. I couldn’t place their accents – although neither had a Yorkshire accent at least – and wasn’t sure if they were local, or from elsewhere, and what it would mean if they were. Was the campsite a kind of scam? Or more a delusion, a belief that this really was an acceptable offering at an acceptable price? Was this man in on it, or was he another victim of ‘Nigel’s’ – if Nigel even existed? What did he think I believed of what he said? What did I believe? – because at first I had really thought there might be twenty-four owls somewhere in the country, and felt anxious to think of them cooped up together in some kind of ramshackle aviary; it was only much later that I realised that I had seen all of the owls that there were to be seen.

I found it all mysterious, and that mystery was in part a kind of sociological mystery, based on gender and class and the country vs the city. I couldn’t ‘read’ these men; their clothes, their hair, their ruddy faces were unintelligible, I couldn’t translate them into types I recognised from the city. And the owls – the fact that owls were involved raised the whole thing, whatever it was about, to the level of allegory.

At the gastropub–artisanal bakery down the road I asked for gossip about the campsite. The staff all knew about it. Apparently the owner had bought the field and did have a licence, but hadn’t received permission from the council nor the parish and so everyone locally was a bit put out. They’d heard other people complain too, about the water and the general condition of the place. And the warden, the owl man, I asked, what about him? He seemed sweet, at least? Oh him, they said, he’s a menace. Always bringing his owls in here, even though we’ve told him not to. Later that day I received another text from Nigel, asking me to rate the campsite out of 5.

I was reminded of this story, which I’d been wanting to write out or ‘use’ in some way, when reading Rosa Lyster’s piece on the trial of the men who cut down the Hadrian’s Wall sycamore. In it she mentions that the younger of the two, Adam Carruthers, had had two owls in his workshop. So perhaps after all this is a thing – perhaps people who have grown up in the country or who are more in with the birdkeeping scene will be like oh yeah, I know the type, the guy with two owls. Perhaps a little childlike, quick to lie implausibly, brought in on mad projects with older men, oblivious to the reactions or outrage of others. I can’t recommend the campsite but if you’re ever in north Norfolk, look out for an eagle owl being flown on a wide, windswept beach (if indeed that part of the story was true), ‘impressive, fierce-looking, unmistakable’ (Collins).