Finding Great UK Motorhome Campsites and Stopovers

How do you find the best UK campsites for your motorhome or campervan holiday or road trip?

We use a few ways to work out where to go, including:

• The park4night app.
• ukcampsite.co.uk, searchforsites.co.uk and pitchup.com.
• Club sites, Certified Locations (CLs), Certified Sites (CSs) and Temporary Holiday Sites (THSs).
• Brit Stops.
• Recommendations from others.
• Google Maps and books.

We’d love to hear from you guys on how you choose where to holiday or stay when road-tripping in the UK. Drop a line in the comments below, we read them all and we all gain a lot from your expertise.

Right-o, a quick look at what constitues a ‘great campsite’ for us. Then we’ll run through the methods we’ve been using these past few years to find our overnight locations in the UK.

What Makes a Great Campsite?

We all like different stuff for our stopovers when we’re on holiday or touring in the UK. For us two, we used to have a dog, which is one of the reasons we got into campervanning in the first place. That meant we used to only choose places which accepted dogs (most do, but some sites and farms won’t).

Since Charlie headed off to the great basket in the sky, we’ve not had that restriction though. We’ve not got children either, so we’re not looking for sites with pools, playgrounds, areas we can play frizbee and the like.

Finally we’re able to spend weeks off-grid, especially in summer, with this motorhome equipment:

• We’ve a roof-mounted 100W solar panel, couple of 86Ah leisure batteries and 300W pure sine inverter. This easily gives us enough power, so electrical hook-up isn’t critical. That’s proved very useful when sites are busy, as usually pitches with hook-up get booked up first. Pitches without power are much easier to get. Another option would be to get a portable solar panel, and/or a mobile power pack. Read more about off-grid motorhome equipment here.
• Our fridge runs on gas and our 17Kg/34 litre self-refillable LPG system lasts for weeks when we’re not using it to heat the van. You don’t need one of these though – just plenty of Calor gas to run your fridge, cook, heat water for showers etc.
• We’re happy to rely on our van’s loo and shower, so don’t need sites with a shower block. Again this has been really handy at times, widening the places we can stay overnight.

The kind of stuff we do look for in a stopover includes:

• Somewhere we’ll get a good night’s sleep, we’re too long in the tooth for boy racers at 1am :-).
• Ideally low-cost (under £15 a night for two people and our van) but we expect to pay more in the UK.
• Close to places we can run or hike.
• Ideally with shade when it’s really sunny.
• Flat enough we can get level with ramps.
• In wet weather, stabalised surfaces so we don’t get stuck in mud.
• With facilities for fresh water and disposing waste.
• Near to beaches, rivers or lakes. They’re just nice to be around.
• Ideally withing walking distance of a village or town with food shops, restuarants etc.

Checking Campsite Availability

When we’re in Europe we tend to use aires, most of which can’t be booked (the campercontact app is great for finding aires).

Here in the UK, in addition to it being summer and the school holidays, the ongoing COVID-19 international travel restrictions mean more UK motorhome and caravan travellers are staying closer to home. Sites are busier as a result, and we feel the need to book ahead to be sure we can get somewhere to sleep each night. Not everyone’s doing this though, it’s just personal preference.

In the weeks we’ve been away we’ve found a mixed bag in terms of available pitches, with some sites being packed (like the Camping and Caravan Club Site at Keswick) and others having tons of space (like the farm campsite at Seathwaite, 10 miles south of Keswick).

Ideally we’d like to be able to pull a single UK-wide website or app and pop in the dates we want a site for, if we need hook-up or not, whether we have a pet or children and roughly where we want to stay. We’d hit a search button, and be presented with a list of sites across the country which have space for us, and the total cost to stay there.

That’s not possible though, no website lists every campsite, and lots of sites don’t want an online booking system. Instead we’re using various websites, books and apps to find places to stay, some of which we can check availability online, others we have to call and ask. It’s not exactly difficult mind you, and we’re enjoying our time wandering about beautiful Britain.

Wild Camping, Aires and Campsites on park4night.com

This might be a bit weird, but I’ll start with the method we’re least likely to use in the UK (or England and Wales at least): park4night.com. This app and website is our go-to method of finding aires and wild-camping spots across Europe, but we only tend to use it in the UK when we’re in Scotland where (out-of-season at least) wild motorhome camping is more tolerated than in England and Wales.

The park4night.com website and smartphone app are sort-of-free to use, but really you need to pay £9.99 a year to create an account which lets you see details of all the places available, use the app offline, contribute your own places and review existing places etc. You can also install the app on some satnavs for a fee, but we’ve never bothered with that.

Park4night has the whole spectrum of overnight stopovers listed, daytime only car parks, day/night car parks, farm sites, wild camping spots, pubs, campsites and aires. Its entries are community-created, with moderators checking entries for suitability and duplicates before they’re ‘officially’ included.

The park4night.com user base tends to focus on free and low-cost places to stay, so relatively few campsites are included, which limits the app’s use for us personally unless we’re in Scotland. Lots of motorhomes and campervans successfully wild camp all the time in the UK though, it’s perfectly possible (the Urban Motorhome’s YouTube channel is proof).

We find the photos and reviews very helpful, but sometimes prices are out-of-date and contact details for booking ahead (where appropriate) aren’t usually included so we end up hunting about outside the app.

In summer 2021 we’re finding that many sites have re-opened their full facilities. Not all have though, and park4night.com is out-of-date in this respect. Check ahead if you need the shower and toilet block to be open.

Campsites on searchforsites.co.uk and ukcampsite.co.uk

We find these two free websites really good for finding campsites in the UK:

• searchforsites.co.uk which includes campsites, pub stop-overs and off-site (wild) parking. All the sites are suitable for self-contained motorhomes and you need to create a (free) login to view site details.

• ukcampsite.co.uk which concentrates purely on formal campsites. Some of these only allow tents, but the site lets you filter them out. There’s no need to log into this site just to view details of sites.

Both have other filters, so you can choose to exclude members-only sites, or only show sites with a sea view for example, depending on which website you’re using. Neither site shows availability, like you get on pitchup.com for example, but that website only seems to include a relatively small number of more expensive sites.

Club Sites, CLs and CSs and Temporary Sites

We joined the Camping and Caravanning Club (C&CC) when we knew we’d be spending much of 2021 in the UK. This gives us access to their club sites, which tend to be bigger, well laid-out sites with high quality shower blocks. The membership also gives us discount at some other ‘listed’ sites on the C&CC website, which aren’t run by the club. We can also use the site’s small (five pitch) affiliated Certified Sites (CSs).

The UK’s other big club, the Camping and Motorhome Club (C&MC), has a similar set-up, with members-only club sites and five-pitch Certified Locations (CLs). CSs and CLs are typically attached to farms, so can be a tad middle-of-nowhere.

The CSs and CLs are a better bet when the larger sites fill up. They usually have fewer facilities like electrical hook-up, playgrounds or shower/toilet blocks. Technically you need to be a member of the appropriate club to use these sites, but some will turn a blind eye. You have to contact each CS yourself to check if they can take you, but the C&MC has recently launched a facility to search and book some of their CLs.

The C&CC also has temporary campsites spread across the country, run by the club’s ‘District Associations’. We’ve used a couple of them, both set in fields with just an Elsan (black waste/toilet) point, fresh water and bins. They only run for a few days at a time, so we have to check where they are. If we’re able to get hold of the wardens, we call ahead and book in. They’re pretty cheap, roughly £5 to £13 a night, and we’ve found them to be good for us.

Pubs and Other Business via Brit Stops

We’ve written about using the Brit Stops scheme before to get free overnight motorhome parking at pubs, restuarants and other businesses across the UK. There’s no website listing out all the locations, instead you need to buy a book each year from britstops.com. This gives you contact and location details for the stops, and you’d typically call ahead to check they’ve space for you.

You’re not obliged to buy anything from the host, but in practice the scheme will only survive if you nip in for a drink/meal/to buy some produce. If you’re on a tight budget, buying drinks and meals in pubs can get a little expensive. Otherwise it feels a win-win deal. These aren’t campsites, so will not normally have facilities like black water disposal. You can’t get your chairs and table out, hang your washing or expect the locations to be perfectly flat or quiet.

Other Options for Finding Sites

On top of the above methods, there a few other options we use:

• Recommendations – friends, Facebook groups and motorhome forums are all rich sources of information for great sites.
• Blogger Maps – check out all these maps of overnight stops created by motorhome tour bloggers.
• Google Maps – search www.google.com/maps for “campsite” and it’ll produce a ton of places to stay with reviews.
• Campsite Books – Martin Dorey’s Take the Slow Road series is very popular for finding UK road trip itineries. The AA’s Camping & Caravanning Guide also gets good reviews.

Over to You!

And over to you ladies and gents – how do you find your best places to stay in your motorhome or camper van in the UK? Use the Comments section below to share your knowledge.

Thanks, Jay and Ju

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