Get away from it all and escape the digital world at a Calder Valley glamping holiday site

Daisy Bank Camp, a glamping site in Hebden Bridge that allows you to escape the digital world, has started themed weekends for its new holiday season encouraging visitors to enjoy the rural surroundings of scenic Calderdale.

Two have taken place already this year on ‘foraging, fermenting and wine-making’ and ‘stitching and sketching’ with owners Angie and Andrew Mossman keen for holiday-makers to embrace nature, wildlife and creativity.

Daisy Bank Camp was starting to take shape in 2019 with the conversion of some equestrian buildings but the Covid pandemic put a new perspective on the direction that the pair would take it.

“In lockdown we could walk on the moors and so many people couldn’t access that,” said Angie.

" We have friends in London and they said so many people needed to escape to nature and that became part of the business - to make sure what we were creating was a space of respite from the intensity of that.

“At first people say ‘there is no tv, no wifi’ and I say, ‘I know, isn’t that brilliant?’

“We have 3.7 metres of glazing that you pull back, huge bi-fold doors facing the sunrise and the moors. That is your television. Be moved by what you can see, smell and hear.”

Angie appreciated the need to get out of cities and into the countryside after spending her early years in a high-rise flat in Peckham.

She said: "I did not have access to nature when I was younger. My mum and dad realised we needed to get out of London. We lived in a high rise in Peckham, we moved to Stevenage and I was fascinated that they had such things as green spaces, trees and country lanes.”

In 1998, Angie got a job with the Halifax Building Society and moved to Holmfirth and, despite leaving that role and going to Milton Keynes, it wasn’t long before she was back in West Yorkshire.

She added: “I had completely fallen in love with Hebden Bridge, got another job, got made redundant but didn’t want to go back down south. Then I met my husband and I have been here 17 years.

"My husband was really comfortable out on the moors but I was really intimidated by the vast expanse - it is such a different landscape for a girl that had always been a townie but seeing the access to nature stimulated that part of me that I felt when I was a kid.”

Daisy Bank Camp has three honeycomb cabins and three stable cabins that don’t have internet, phone signal or tv reception but do have reading lights, terraces to enjoy views and the Calderdale and Pennine Ways and the Sustrans National Route 68 cycle route on the doorstep and the couple are on hand to point you in the right direction for walks.

Angie added: “More and more ideas have started to come around to move away from the digital world, be in a place of peace and nature and be supported and encouraged to try something new and open the creative part of the brain.

“We are so fortunate to have this on our doorstep, it is almost a crime not to bring people to it.”