- Sea of Tents
Festival Camping Gear
It’s a fact that the best festivals always involve camping – and if this is your first festival, you need to go with the right attitude to camping. Forget any ideas you have about waking up to fresh country air, calm, birdsong and greenery – this is festival camping. Its only relation to mainstream leisure camping is that tents and sleeping bags are involved. Remember this and you won’t go far wrong.
There’s a ton of advice out there on festival camping – what to take, where to pitch up, how to arrange your tents in circles, that kind of thing. And there’s plenty of websites and shops who’ll sell you a complete ‘Festival Camping Pack’ – some of these deals are pretty good too. But you have to strike a balance between performance and cost because, sadly, there’s a chance your kit might not make it home with you. If it’s good quality and expensive it might go ‘walkabout’. Or you just can’t be bothered to pack it away again at Festival end. Or, and this is much more likely, you can’t actually remember where it is at Festival close. A weekend of heavy festivalling can have a pretty bad effect on the memory.
Given the normal British summer, the nights will either be cold or roasting hot. If they’re cold you’ll be relying on your sleeping bag to keep you warm. Waking up cold and hungover is a pretty poor start to the day. Preferably you need to wake up warm – and hungover. Still hungover, agreed, but you won’t feel quite as bad. A lot of ‘Festival Pack’ sleeping bags are pretty basic and won’t actually keep you that warm but buying a decent bag could set you back as much again as the ‘Pack’ did.
And what if there’s a heatwave and it’s like an oven in your tent? You don’t want to wake up too hot, dehydrated and hungover now do you?
It’s a dilemma but there is a solution. You don’t need to buy a new, top of the range, sleeping bag nor do you have to sleep exposed to the elements (and bugs) to stay comfortable. All you have to do is buy a lightweight silk sleeping bag liner.
Silk liners are brilliant!
Use one inside your sleeping bag and it will increase the temperature by anything up to eight degrees – as well as protecting your sleeping bag from muddy feet and the like. If it’s too hot to use a sleeping bag, just sleep inside the liner. It’ll help keep you cool by ‘wicking’ moisture away from your body, it’ll also keep insects away from you and silk just feels soooooo luxurious against your skin.
A decent silk sleeping bag liner is lightweight and takes up next to no room in a rucksack or day pack. You’ll easily be able to carry it with you even if you decide to leave the rest of your kit for the Festival clear up team.
The New Zealand made Jag Bag silk sleeping bag liners are some of the best on the market. They start at only £16 and come in a range of styles, colours and prices. There’s even a double sized silk liner for those who’d like to share the luxurious experience of silk on skin. All the liners come in their own silk stuff sack, are hand washable and dry in minutes – handy if you have some kind of Festival ‘accident’. Here’s a few pictures to give you an idea of exactly what the Jag Bag silk liners are like:
- Sunset Shades Jag Bag and Stuff Sack
- Turquoise Jag Bag
- Turquoise Jag Bag Detail
- Paua Jag Bag Detail
- Jag Bag Size Guide
My personal recommendation for a Festival Camping liner would be the Standard Fine Silk Liner at just £16 (plus P+P). It offers outstanding comfort and value for money and is small enough to be stuffed into a pocket. All the Jag Bag silk sleeping bag liners I sell are posted out within 2 days of purchase and they all have a Lifetime Guarantee. If they ever fail in normal use just send them back for a replacement. Please note – using them to slide across muddy festival fields doesn’t count as normal use.
Silk is an incredibly strong and flexible natural product and treated properly, a Jag Bag silk sleeping bag liner will give years of use. They’re not just for Festival Camping either they’re ideal for mainstream leisure camping, extreme camping or any kind of travelling. You can use then in sleeping bags, tents, dorms, hotel beds where you fancy a barrier between you and the sheets or even just by themselves. They can keep you cool, they can keep you warm. A Jag Bag silk sleeping bag liner is an indispensable and versatile piece of kit.
You can check out the full range of Jag Bags here.
Gather Round
You must log in to post a comment.
{ 1 trackback }