Camping in Oxford

Oxford itself has almost no room for campsites - the land inside the ring road is either built on, owned by a college, or floodplain - so camping here means pitching in the villages and river valleys within a fifteen-mile ring and travelling in. That is less of a compromise than it sounds. The Park and Ride network is designed exactly for this, and one long-established club site sits close enough to the Abingdon Road that you can walk into the city along the Thames path in well under an hour.

The terrain is gentle: this is the upper Thames valley, flat to softly rolling, with the Cotswold escarpment rising away to the west. Most pitches are level meadow grass, and hardstandings are common because the clay holds water. Several of the better sites occupy former gravel workings flooded into lakes, and nothing here is remote - you are rarely more than a mile from a village pub.

The weather is about as kind as England gets. Oxfordshire is among the drier and warmer counties, with roughly 650 millimetres of rain a year and summer highs commonly in the low to mid twenties. The catch is the rivers: the Thames, Cherwell, Windrush and Evenlode all flood in winter and after prolonged rain, so low-lying riverside sites can lose pitches at short notice, and almost every site in the area closes for the winter. The practical season runs from March or April to late October, with May, June and September the sweet spot - long days, dry ground and no school-holiday premium.

Wild camping is not legal in England without the landowner's permission and there is no exception here. Port Meadow, the college land and the Thames path are all off limits, and enforcement close to the city is active. Use a proper site, ask permission if you want to pitch on farmland, and if you are travelling the Thames by boat or canoe arrange a mooring through the Environment Agency or a riverside pub rather than pitching on the bank.