Five nostalgic outdoor activities that aren’t just for kids

As kids, dens were serious business. Blankets, branches, cushions nicked from the sofa, all turned into secret spaces that you could disappear into. As an adult, we still have that desire to carve out a smaller, personal world for ourselves within a bigger one, but now more in the form of spaces like a reading nook carved out by a window, a garden shed turned into a quiet hideaway, or a corner of a cabin that becomes “your side”.  

If you’d rather skip the building phase, some of our places have already done it for you. At Silva Treehouse in Cumbria, a slide leads straight into a hidden den space with a bar and games room. At Turner’s Woodland Site in Devon, everything feels handmade and slightly storybook, with a yurt crafted from a reclaimed sail, brush handles repurposed as draught excluders, and a separate woodland hut made from fallen trees. It all builds towards the same feeling, that slow return to campouts, just with better bedding.

If you grew up in the UK, chances are you’ve spent time crouched over a rockpool. It’s not hard to see why children become completely absorbed by these miniature, detailed worlds. Suddenly there’s a whole ecosystem to decode, where marine life were characters and seaweed became forests, and before long you’d be narrating something in your head that no one else could see.  

That sense of discovery is still there – all you need are some sea shoes, a small bucket for shell collecting and a magnifying glass to get a closer look without disturbing anything. Around Sandy Toes Beach House on the Isle of Sheppey, low tide reveals pools filled with beadlet anemones, small shore crabs, blennies, limpets and the occasional shrimp flicking through the shallows. Go when the tide is at its lowest, ideally on a spring tide, to see the most activity and you’ll start to notice just how much is going on in a space no bigger than a sink.

A hill never used to be just a hill. It was something to run up, roll down, or launch yourself off with very little concern for the possibility of injury. That loose, reckless abandon was the ultimate sense of freedom as a child and is probably why the smell of freshly cut grass still hits some kind of nostalgic nerve. Grass sledging taps straight into that feeling. It’s repetitive in the best way: climb, slide, repeat, until you forget why you started. 

At Fuggle Treehouse in Herefordshire, the grass sledges are ready and waiting, and the surrounding meadowland is basically an open invitation to get sliding. Along with swings, trails, and even kite flying, there’s enough here to turn an afternoon into something that feels unstructured and fun, where spending time doing something in the outdoors for no real reason starts to make sense again.

Who remembers the feeling when the paddling pool came out and suddenly the garden became the most exciting place on earth? Wild swimming is essentially that, just stretched out into rivers, lakes and the sea. You get the same cold shock and emit the same slightly unhinged laughter when you first get in, but the difference now is you’re surrounded by proper landscape instead of a patch of lawn and a hosepipe. 

For something expansive, places like a private lake in Powys such as at The Green Retreat offer that wide-open, uninterrupted swim where the water feels like it belongs entirely to you. If you are not quite ready to abandon the comfort of a controlled splash zone, spots like At The Hideaway at Devon Heaven Hideaways offer a gentler threshold with a hot tub for easing in, and a cold plunge for the brave moments in between.

A campfire as a child felt like a proper event. There always seemed to be a moment where it definitely wasn’t working, followed by a sudden overcorrection where everything caught at once and the first batch of marshmallows were sacrificed in the process. As a child, it mainly meant getting to roast these sweet treats until they had a molten centre and charcoal shell and staying up later than usual. 

Not much changes, only now no one calls bedtime and enforces a less than fair curfew while the adults get to stay up and have fun. You can stay exactly where you are, poking the fire and letting the flickering flames hypnotise you until your hearts content. So many of our places come with fire pits, but some take it to the next level. At Wild Vixen, one of our shepherds’ huts in Somerset, their woodland fireside experience turns it into a full evening event, hamper and all. A great one to book near Bonfire night.

It’s easy to forget how little it takes to feel entertained. A hill, a stretch of water, a patch of ground, something to build or light or slide down. None of it is new. In fact, you’ve probably done all of this before, just without thinking twice about it. The difference now is you’re a bit more likely to talk yourself out of it or feel like you need a better reason.  But you don’t. That same instinct is still there, it just needs a bit of space and time to show up again.