OK, let’s talk tactics. We need a team to be on offense, a team on defence, and a team of floaters to release players from jail.” The man delivering this strategic address has somehow become our de facto leader – I suspect because he has a Rocky-style bandana tied around his forehead. Well, that and a sombre, steely-eyed determination reminiscent of an army general straight out of War and Peace. I quickly volunteer for the role of “floater”; it sounds low stakes, low reward. Just the way I like it.
We’re currently engaged in a “friendly” bout of capture the flag, a game I haven’t played since childhood. There’s not a child in sight here, though – just a bunch of grown adults huddled in a forest glade. As has quickly become apparent, some people are taking it far more seriously than others. One woman on the opposing team appears to be wearing an actual unitard, as if gearing up to compete in a county athletics meet.
Suffice to say my friend Victoria and I, aged 44 and 38 respectively, are a little more laid-back about the whole affair. I’m concentrating all my energy, in fact, on keeping a straight face as our glorious leader barks out final instructions before we begin. For all his Napoleonic airs, the man has a squirrel tail protruding from his trousers. He’s not the only one – scanning the group, I spot people sporting fox ears, hawk feathers and badger stripes.
This is Camp Wildfire, an over-18s festival that markets itself as a summer camp for adults. With the tagline “Adventure by day, party by night”, each event sees around two thousand grown-ups descend on some remarkably pretty woodland in rural Kent for a long weekend to release their inner child. Free from minors and temporarily absolved of life’s responsibilities, attendees can sign up to a vast array of activities ranging from the traditional (tree climbing, archery, raft building) to the more quirky (pole dancing, wabi-sabi pottery, drag queen life drawing) before getting their groove on to DJs and live music acts after dark. Now in its tenth year, the unique proposition has gone from strength to strength since its inception.
I’m clearly the target market: Wildfire ads have been popping up with increasing frequency on my Instagram feed over the past 12 months. And it seems the millennial-focused social media campaign has been a success – I unexpectedly bump into two acquaintances over the next three days, while nearly everyone here appears to be in the 29-45 age bracket (though there are some outliers, with people ranging from early twenties into their sixties). Part of me is deliriously excited at the prospect of combining recapturing the innocence of youth – scrambling up trees, playing games for the first time in a quarter century, getting into some low-key craft – with letting off steam on the dancefloor come sundown. Another part of me can’t help but feel a sharp jab of cynicism at the concept. Was this more evidence of my generation’s famed arrested development and devolution into eternal kidulthood – our refusal to grow up, take responsibility and commit to life’s major milestones (which we’re now achieving later and later, if at all)? Was it evidence that we’ve reached peak “Disney adult”?
Or perhaps that should be peak “Harry Potter adult”. My demographic is known for our deep-rooted allegiance to JK Rowling’s magical world, even if we abhor her Terf ideology, and Camp Wildfire’s “patrols” feel heavily Hogwarts-coded. These are four teams – houses, you might even say – each represented by a different animal with corresponding attributes. Campers choose whether to be squirrels (cheeky, entertaining and sociable), foxes (sneaky, creative and cunning), badgers (loyal, passionate and kooky) or hawks (adventurous, outgoing and agile) – hence all the tails and ears on display. Participants can win tokens for their patrol throughout the festival and there’s even a central arena with tiered seating that undeniably resembles a bijou quidditch stadium.
Not being ones to do the reading beforehand, Victoria and I had found ourselves utterly bemused upon arrival to find most other festival-goers fully prepped and dressed in head-to-toe regalia. There’s plenty of merch available to purchase to support your patrol: scout-inspired uniforms include shirts, hats, badges, patches, kerchiefs and woggles. With a good chunk of fellow attendees being defined as “veterans” – meaning they’d been to at least one Camp Wildfire previously – we felt slightly like uninitiated civilians wandering haplessly into the midst of a mysterious sect. There were team chants that everyone already knew. There were team colours to pledge allegiance to your chosen animal cohort. Everyone seemed very… invested.
Regardless, an undeniable thrill permeated the air as proceedings kicked off with a parade from the campsite into the festival itself, complete with a marching brass band and Red Arrows-style aerial display from four light aircraft that shot out plumes of coloured smoke as they flew in elaborate loop-de-loops.
We decided to arbitrarily throw our lot in with the squirrels, for no real reason other than that their chant – “Whose nuts?”, “These nuts!” – seemed mercifully easy to master. Once we reached the central arena, the opening ceremonies commenced and innuendo-laden games followed (think attempting to catch a gherkin dangling from a fishing rod in your open mouth while blindfolded). Craning to see over hundreds of other heads that seemed to project far more excitement than we were capable of mustering while sober, we decided to venture forth under the light-strewn tree canopy and buy a cocktail in a pineapple instead.
The night took us from a dinner of bougie mac and cheese to an energetic round of Cockney rhyming slang bingo – shouts of “oi, oi, saveloy!” accompanying every completed line – to dancing to the superior MC-ing skills and garage beats of electronic trio Girls Next Door. It felt genuinely liberating to throw our best shapes amid age-appropriate peers, a feat normally only achievable at a wedding these days, before happily trudging back to our glamping yurt at the respectable hour of 1am.
I’d perhaps gone slightly overboard with the scheduling of activities for the rest of the weekend. The next morning saw me dragging us out of bed at 8.30am to attend a sound bath before flower headdress making and the aforementioned cutthroat game of capture the flag. The afternoon’s itinerary felt pleasingly more “adult” than “summer camp”: at three in the afternoon, we made our way, stumbling and giggling, to a burlesque dance class after consuming a lethal shot and two potent cocktails in under an hour during a mixology workshop.
The Sunday, meanwhile, was all about being a big kid. Zip lining! Tree climbing! Flying trapeze! I scampered up ropes and did backward flips and felt my stomach fill with butterflies as I flew through the air with, well, not quite the greatest of ease, but certainly a hell of a lot of exhilaration. During an afternoon game of The Traitors, I took childish pleasure in being assigned the role of backstabber and lying my way through every round until the end, when I was crowned the lone winner. “Haha!” I wanted to shriek with The Simpsons Nelson Muntz-style glee. It all felt gloriously removed from the heaviness of the “real world”, of far-right marches and political assassinations – a much-needed shot of pure escapism amid the swirling chaos and unrest.
Beyond the wholesome activities, the entire vibe was, for want of a better word, nice. People seemed decent, kind and friendly; no one was off their face or a d***head or a liability. Wildfire had cultivated the kind of environment where you could leave a bag unattended, confident that it would remain unpilfered. The workshops were well-executed and high-spec – heck, even the food trucks were curated to perfection (Sen Noods, a regular pop-up at London streetfood markets, was a particular standout). Designed for a slightly older, slightly more discerning crowd than your average festival goer – with, yes, slightly deeper pockets – the whole experience was pitched at just the right level of luxe.
Really, the only thing stopping it from feeling the ideal festival for someone at my age and stage was those blasted patrols. Though I’ve never thought of myself as anything other than a deeply uncool bundle of enthusiasm, more labrador puppy than black cat energy, there was something about the zealous “organised fun” of it all that struck too close to my cringe reflex. Perhaps it’s because I’ve actually been a summer camp leader for children in the past – but I couldn’t quite get into the swing of things and shake off the squirming inner awkwardness. “Wow, there sure are a lot of nerds here, aren’t there?!” as Victoria commented with benign amusement (and without malice) at one point.
On the final evening, I ran into an old colleague and we delightedly caught up in between learning Bollywood dance moves. It turned out she’d been coming for five years. “I know it feels a bit like a cult,” she said, shrugging, “but it’s a safe festival with a lovely atmosphere in a beautiful environment. My partner and I come with our friends, and we get to play games and let our hair down, drink and dance and leave our kid at home for the weekend. So even if it is a cult – it’s a pretty good one?”
As we watch the closing ceremony together, and I look across the crowd to see hundreds of beaming faces radiating joy from the simple pleasure of popping on a fox tail and playing a silly children’s game, I can see what she means. So the next time someone shouts “Whose nuts?”, I yell back with all the fervour of a freshly brainwashed cult member: “THESE NUTS!”
Camp Wildfire is running for two weekends in 2026: 28-31 August and 4-7 September. Earlybird tickets start from £269 or £24.45 a month, including three nights and 60 credits to spend on activities. campwildfire.co.uk
