Keswick: Our First Camping and Caravan Club Site

After a lovely few days at the Temporary Holiday Site at Lyme Marina, we moved north to meet up with friends at the Keswick Camping and Caravan Club Site  (N54.6003, W3.1501). We’re making sure we get maximum value from our Camping and Caravan Club membership – in fact, we’ve now already got our membership fee back in discounts at their campsites.

Would we have stayed on these sites if we weren’t members? Truthfully, we’d have probably just looked for smaller, cheaper sites in the area. There do seem to be a lot of temporary sites opening up for August, which is encouraging when we expect lots of other sites to fill up.

Our friends Richard and Jenny told us a few months back that they were going to Keswick in July. When we looked to join them we weren’t club members, so the price was over £40 a night. The site was full anyway though, so cost wasn’t an issue.

We met Richard, Jenny and their pooch Carling (who is now playing with our pooch Charlie somewhere in doggie heaven) in Estonia when they pulled up beside us in a random car park. We had a quick chat but a few minutes layer we discovered that a rock concert was going to be held in a nearby park. After hearing the band’s warm-up we knew it would be loud! We pulled up park4night and found a quieter place a few miles away by the sea.

A couple of hours later, Richard and Jenny joined us at our new parking spot for the night, and we haven’t been able to shake them since. I’m kidding of course, but it is a standing joke between us that they’ve a tracker on our van as we would bump into each other in the most remote places. They are a fantastic couple, with a wonderful outlook on life and we’re now firm friends.

After returning from a week in North Wales in our motorhome we were unsure where to head on our next trip, so we thought we’d stalk Richard and Jenny and see if Keswick had any space. We were amazed and happy to find we could get a pitch for a few nights while they were there.

At this point please forgive me while I vent about the Camping and Caravan Club booking system! It’s not great. It doesn’t tell you when there is space, so you just have to keep checking different date combinations. I checked for a week in Keswick, it said no. Thinking the weekend would be the problem I checked for 4 nights, it said yes.

Wanting to be there a little longer I checked for five nights, it said no, so I put back in those same 4 nights, and it said no. I called the booking helpline and they said it was full. Half an hour later, out of curiosity, I checked those 4 nights again and was able to book. I can only think it blocks out the dates for a period of time so you can complete your booking, even if you have already closed that page. Needless to say, it was a tad frustrating when you consider how user-friendly the booking systems are for some other companies.

With our booking confirmation email in hand (just in case the system was playing up) we stopped off on our way there for LPG and a big food shop in Penrith to ensure we didn’t arrive before 1pm. That meant we missed out on the passive/aggressive telling off that Richard and Jenny got when they rocked up around 11.30am! They were turned away and returned just before 1pm to join the large queue of rigs waiting to get in.

When we arrived, signs directed us to the left hand lane and we were met by several site wardens. One took our booking details, including phone number in case of flooding, and we were then handed over to another warden who would take us to our pitch. The pitches aren’t allocated, instead the staff cycle in front of you and you beep when you see a pitch you like, they’ll then let you know if it’s free.

After visiting many, many campsites across Europe, this whole process seemed to be very labour intensive. Most places we’ve been on arrival at reception you’re allocated a pitch and shown it on a map, given a map with the free places highlighted or just told park where you want and let them know, or if it’s really quiet just park up anywhere. Still it meant that we were constantly entertained by the staff cycling ahead of a steady stream of vans while we were there.

We picked a pitch within sight of Richard and Jenny’s van and a good catch up over dinner we settled down in their van to watch the Euro 2020 final. All across the campsite you could see the green glow from TV sets in vans and tents and the silence after 11pm rule was forgotten for the night. It was such a shame to lose on penalties, but our lads did a fantastic job to get so far in the competition.

The following few days we tried our hands at SUP (stand-up paddle boarding) on the lake (you can launch from the campsite beach for a small fee), which was much more successful then when Jay tried stand-up paddle boarding in the sea at San Sebastian.  

Jay did some running in the fells, and I ran along the old train line which is used as the route of the Keswick Parkrun. Hopefully on Saturday it will be full of life as the runners finally return after sixteen months of no Parkruns.

One day we popped on our face masks and squeezed onto the little bus to take us to the bottom of Catbells, a popular hill walk a few miles along the lake. Getting off the bus we were greeted with a sign that told us the summit was a mile away and it would take us around an hour to walk up there. I thought it was joking, it wasn’t. But then we did stop several times to take in the views.

After an ice cream at the small café in Grange, we walked along the eastern shore of Derwent Water back to the campsite. By the end of the day we’d walked over 10 miles, so that evening Jenny and I cycled to the local chippy and we all sat in our camping chairs on the lakeside beach eating fish and chips with a view you would pay a fortune for in a posh restaurant.  

There is so much to see and do around Keswick and the Club Site (along with the Derwent Water Club Site next door) are perfectly placed to enjoy it all. For us it wasn’t cheap, at around £33 a night, but that included electrical hook-up and some very handy showers for when you get out of the lake (very clean, but push button ones, my bugbear, which weren’t particularly hot).

I guess my main gripes would be the fact that there were only two toilet blocks for all the vans and tents on site, and only two elsan points, both in the toilet blocks and quite some way from some of the pitches – if your cassette doesn’t have wheels you might want to decamp and drive to the service point.

Also, I didn’t really like the ‘corporateness’ of the place. I know it’s a big, popular and busy site and it must be hard to run and keep tabs on everything, but the systems and processes didn’t seem very customer friendly.

When wanted to see about extending our stay for a night I wandered over to reception and was greeted by a sign saying reception was closed due to Covid and you needed to phone them. After several unsuccessful attempts, I managed to catch one of the wardens when they cycled by and she confirmed that the number hasn’t worked for ages and I had to go to reception between 9am and 10am or 4pm and 5pm.

OK, no worries, I did just that but was told there were no spaces. When asked if they could take my details in case they got a cancellation or no show (there were several empty pitches on the site), the response was that they couldn’t do that as they would have lists everywhere, so I would have to check every day.

I tried to book an extra night on the website, but it has a minimum stay of three nights, so it wasn’t meant to be. On Thursday morning we said farewell to Richard and Jenny and set off for a farm campsite off the south end of Derwent Lake.

Possibly the total opposite of the Club Site, a much more basic site where you park where you want, stay as long as you want and there’s an honesty box to pay for your stay. It’s called Seathwaite Farm, and it’s a famous start point for the hike up Scafell Pike. We’ll write more about it in our next post.

Ju x

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