Glamp and Tipple

Guests tip-toe around in fluffy white robes, bottles clink in the minibar and hairdryers are available for use after a dip in the hot tub. Glamp and Tipple is more like a hotel than most bell tent sites you’ll visit but it’s got a few differences too. Carpeted corridors have been swapped for grassy pathways, wheelbarrows take the place of luggage trolleys and piped music is replaced by birdsong. It’s a kind of deconstructed boutique guest house with each room having landed in a tent on a farmer’s field in south Norfolk.

When glamping goes “high end” it usually moves out of bell tents and into yurts, safari tents or something more solid but this site in Great Ellingham is committed to canvas. Born out of a bell tent hire company which burst onto the scene in 2020, the Glamp and Tipple site at Rookery Farm represents the putting down of roots. The company still hires bell tents for back garden glamping but head to the site and you’ll have a fuller experience. In addition to your tent you get a warm welcome, a big field, a location on the Suffolk-Norfolk border, posh loos, a games room, a kids’ play area, a farm shop and a true escape.

There are just five super spacious bell tents here. In addition to the hotel style furnishings they have the charm of camping; a log burner and twinkling fairylights with a picnic table and firepit outside. And then there are the extras: hot tubs, an in-tent cinema experience, and bottles of bubbly among them. Each tent has a designated eco-toilet and a power shower and there’s a shared log cabin with a snug chill-out area, games room, under-cover cooking space and honesty shop.

The intention here is clear, stated in the name in fact; this is a place to relax and take a break, to enjoy the outdoors with a glass of Champagne in hand. But it’s also Norfolk and there’s lots to explore. If you’re not an East Anglian the lure of the Broads, of the coast and historic Norwich will, no doubt, tempt you to spend days out and about. All this is within an hour’s drive, so who could blame you? En route back, why not stop off at one of the great local pubs nearby? That way, when you get back to site you can forget about cooking and simply spend your evening doing what you’re meant to: glamping and tippling.