We also walk a bit, and this year made our first visit to the yurts our host Julian Usborne, ever a trend-spotter, has just had erected on the estate.
Yurts are not, in fact, native to the Cotswolds. Though if the early Mongolians had deliberately set out to capture the sub-Glastonbury UK tourist trade, they could hardly have done better. The countryside around Stroud is absolutely stiff with well-heeled new-age eco-baby-boomers (or, as we used to call them, sad old hippies). After a hard day teaching ceramics or making Channel 4 documentaries about one another, there’s nothing they like better than to curl up on a yak skin in front of the stove with a glass of nettle wine and The Guardian.
The Luxury Yurt Break – or ‘posh camping’ - is big business. The circular tents with their upholstered interiors and wood-burners are cosy and stunningly romantic. The romance stems not least from intimacy – with just one undivided space there’s not a lot of privacy. Then there’s the smell.
Yurts don’t smell of anything in particular, but campers do. When nomadic Mongolians pitched camp, they didn’t worry about sanitary or catering facilities. Yurts don’t have bathrooms.
To me, the words 'luxury' and 'communal shower block' can never sit well together.
Julian has compensated with delightful little sheds perched high in the hillside, complete with pretty china ewers, ingenious homespun toilet-roll holders and chemical loos. Here you can meditate for hours gazing over a delightful leafy valley, whilst fellow-yurters, cross-legged with urgency, bang on the door.
We were thinking of renting the triumvirate for a group holiday, until we saw the prices. One 3-person yurt, complete with chemical loo and shared kitchen facilities, costs not that much less than our 3 bedroom stone cottage complete with central heating, proper bathroom and DVD player.
Call me a philistine and a pervert – I’d rather go cottaging than yurting any day.
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