Wray Valley Camping owners Michelle Grist and her partner Kevin Chamberlain have spent seven years restoring this fragile ecosystem while developing the adjacent campsite.<\/p>\n
Hound Tor is an easy cycle from the campsite. Photograph: Paul Biggins\/Alamy<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always intended to run a sustainable campsite from here,\u201d says Michelle, a retired environmental consultant, admitting that neither she nor Kevin (a member of the Dartmoor search and rescue Ashburton team) had ever run one previously. \u201cWe did not take it over,\u201d she adds. \u201cWe built it from scratch.\u201d Years of camping, both in the UK and abroad, gave them enough experience to know what they liked and what they didn\u2019t. The valley\u2019s topography dictated their designs from the start, Kevin explains \u2013 tents only, nothing driven in.<\/p>\n
The early years were slow-going: Kevin built a compost toilet by hand before a shower block and other facilities arrived. Running alongside it all was the harder, longer graft of coaxing the temperate rainforest back to life.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was actually difficult getting on to the land,\u201d Michelle tells me. \u201cWhile the drains upland had been cleared, our land was completely flooded.\u201d Michelle and Kevin worked along with several other organisations to restore the woodland, adding 1,200 native plants, 200 metres of new hedgerow and 45 native saplings as well as removing invasive species.<\/p>\n
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If you\u2019re asking people to make a bit more effort to protect this environment, it tends to attract those who appreciate it<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Their efforts culminated in February this year, when Wray Valley Camping saw six acres of its 4-hectare (10-acre) estate designated a Devon county wildlife site (CWS)<\/a>, recognising its importance as one of Dartmoor\u2019s fragile remnants of temperate rainforest and wet woodland. The campsite now offers a unique opportunity to sleep beside this rare ecosystem in one of its four Nearly Wild camping pitches.<\/p>\n
A short signposted sustainability trail around the campsite and woodland explains the restoration work. Along the way, I spot a pied flycatcher between the oaks, hazels, rowans and willows while stonechats call to each other and an oil beetle meanders across a mossy stone in search of food.<\/p>\n
In the distance, the whiz of bike chains and children\u2019s voices echo from the Wray Valley Trail<\/a>. This 7-mile (11km) walk and cycle track snakes along the edge of the temperate rainforest, retracing where the Moretonhampstead and South Devon Railway steam train once ran. Today it links the historic villages of Moretonhampstead and Lustleigh, and beyond to Bovey Tracey.<\/p>\n
Kirsten Amor and her husband John Higgins camping at Wray Valley. Photograph: Kirsten Amor<\/p>\n
As I walk along the old trackbeds of the valley trail, I imagine iron cleaving the valley and clouding it with steam and soot. When once the scream of the train whistle heralded fallen timber and quarried stone, today it\u2019s given way to the shrill call of the treecreeper. It\u2019s a small measure of how fast this corridor has recovered since industry nearly gutted it in the 19th century.<\/p>\n
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Without the white noise of everyday life, every splash and wingbeat becomes audible<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Wray Valley Trail acts as a low-impact gateway for exploring eastern Dartmoor, and it is worth building a few days\u2019 itineraries around it. From the Wray Valley campsite, it\u2019s an easy cycle or walk to Lustleigh and on towards Hound Tor, where towering granite boulders guard the low moss-strewn walls of abandoned medieval settlements. Waymarked paths from here weave between Dartmoor\u2019s scattered prehistoric monuments and weatherworn waycrosses.<\/p>\n
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