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Always a home

My name is Bobby Gedling, and I have been a Scout Leader for over 23 years. In that time I have camped at lots of different sites, from small Group-owned muddy fields (next to the local pig-farm; NICE), basic District-owned sites, larger County-owned facilities, and most of the "national" Scout campsites. For the last 14 years, I have brought my Troop to camp, every Easter and occasionally at other times, at my favourite Scout campsite - Walton Firs.

Walton Firs is a beautiful place, and an extremely well-maintained site. The facilities are good, but it takes more than facilities to make for a great campsite. The staff - the wardens, full-time and volunteer service crew - are fantastic. While always being reassuringly "the same" each year, there is always something new to discover and explore. Successive "generations" of Scouts have got "lost" in the woods, scraped their knees in the ravine, failed to spot the enormous pile of logs on the natural woodpile (what IS it about pallets ...?), and discovered that they CAN do the seemingly-impossible while taking part in the many on-site activities.

But that is not why I love Walton Firs. The times I cherish the most are the quiet times - early in the morning before the Scouts are out of their tents, late at night, sitting round the campfire, odd moments throughout the day. This is when you become aware of the real "residents" of Walton Firs - the hedgehogs, deer, foxes, woodpeckers, magpies, crows, finches, sparrows, tits, pigeons, owls, rabbits, robins, thrushes, bats, moles, small rodents, squirrels, pheasants - Walton Firs is never silent and still. At Easter, when the birds are mating and nesting, the birdsong during daylight hours can be deafening.

It is at Walton Firs that I have had some of my most thrilling close encounters with British wildlife. Driving up to the car park, rabbits skittering back and forth across the track, pheasants rocketing out of the undergrowth on either side. Sitting on a log outside a mess tent on a frosty morning, a cup of coffee in hand, a robin attacking the worm-like laces of my hiking boots. Mid-morning, down in the campfire circle, another cup of coffee in hand, as two adult and one juvenile deer walk slowly through the clearing. Lunch-time, feeding bits of a cheese sandwich to a cheeky grey squirrel by hand. Mid-afternoon, picking up a stunned green woodpecker - well, it WAS perched on the trunk of one of the "goalposts", so it should have EXPECTED a close encounter with a football - and getting pecked through my work gloves as it recovered. Dinner-time, losing a Patrol's uncooked meat to a gang of magpies. Dusk, singing "quiet" songs by the campfire, as a pair of hedgehogs scurry around the circle and bats flitter around the edges of the firelight. Last thing at night, securing the mess tent, and discovering a fox calmly sitting under one of the tables.

I truly love this site - always different, always new, always a "home".