The team at Nesta Camping know how to respond to turbulent times. For their business – usually organising festivals for thousands – recent times have been about adapting. For their guests, it's been about offering a retreat from reality and creating a small, tranquil haven where you can enjoy nights under the stars and range of relaxing, holistic therapies. There are hot tubs, there are drinks and there are forest-school arts and crafts sessions for the kids, so they can learn their ABC's while you sip your G&Ts. And it's all run in a festival style, with various businesses on-site running the bar, the activities and all the frills.
One mile west of Frome and just north of English Heritage-owned Nunney Castle, Nesta Camping is a prime example of the happy medium between suburban and gently wild land. There's meadowy space, bluebell-clad woods and old oaks, all resulting in room enough for children to roam free. For adults, meanwhile, there's yoga and a wellness studio, as well as an onsite massage therapist to visit. If that doesn't hit the spot, there's also a bistro and cocktail lounge, with locally sourced food on the bar menu, Somerset cider on the drinks menu and a decent range of handcrafted cocktails from their in-house mixologist, all backed by live acoustic music.
If you haven't already got the picture, camping here errs heavily on the side of comfort. There's no need for you to lift a finger and certainly no need to bring your own tent. Accommodation comes in the form of pre-pitched yurts – there's a range of sizes to choose from, all with soft furnishings and the larger ones with proper wood-framed beds – and an onsite 'pamper parlour' has electricity for charging phones and using hair straighteners. And in the spirit of never having to lift a finger, you can even order drinks straight to your yurt.
To be clear, this is less a campsite, more an outdoor hotel, so it's important to note that some things are not quite as you would expect at a regular campsite. For instance, the yurts are lined up near to each other and all contained in one meadow area, which also houses the cocktail bar and bistro, so the vibe is more like a VIP-style festival glamping experience rather than a quiet campsite with your own private area to spread out. This festival vibe also extends to the approach to food and drink – guests are expected to use the on-site bar and bistro for their needs rather than bringing their own, and there aren't really facilities to help with that anyway, such as kitchen areas, communal fridges or ice pack re-freezing. It's helpful to understand that from the outset as this arrangement is not what many regular campers would expect. The setting too is unusual for a campsite, being in an edge-of-town location, on a small estate shared with other businesses and adjacent to a sports ground. However, once inside the soothing surroundings of Nesta Camping, the immediate outside world disappears and the lure of a hot tub, a massage, or a cocktail, takes over.
Not every hour should be spent luxuriating with a cocktail in hand. It takes around half an hour to walk into the centre of Frome, where there's a market on Wednesdays and Saturdays and ample independent shops and cafés every other day of the week. In the other direction you can follow a footpath to the trees beside Nunney Brook then join the Macmillan Way, which follows the stream all the way to moated, 14th-century Nunney Castle (free entry), taking about 35 minutes each way. Further afield you can drive to Wells, Longleat, Bath and the Mendip Hills, all within half an hour, while it's also around 50 minutes to Bristol.