The Gatehouse Peldon, on the edge of Abberton Reservoir
Six acres of pasture on Lodge Lane, in the parish of Peldon, five and a half miles south of Colchester. It looks north over seven hundred hectares of open water and the birds that winter on it.
The campsite takes up to five vans, with a separate area for tents. Every pitch has electric hook-up and water, campfires are allowed and dogs are welcome. It is registered with the Camping and Caravanning Club as a certificated site.
It is registered under a different name from the one on its own sign, which is the first thing worth knowing about it. See the two names this place goes by.
Abberton Reservoir, the parish boundary of Peldon and Mersea Island, drawn from Ordnance Survey data by way of OpenStreetMap. The mainland coastline is not shown: only shapes with verifiable geometry are drawn here.
Where this actually is
Lodge Lane runs south off the road between Abberton and Peldon and stops at the water. The land either side of it is farmland, flat and open, and the reservoir fills most of the northern horizon. Peldon village is half a mile down the lane; the parish it belongs to holds five hundred and sixty-eight people.
This is the narrow neck of ground between two very different pieces of water. North is Abberton, a freshwater reservoir dug and dammed in the nineteen thirties and now one of the most important wintering grounds for wildfowl in Britain. South, four miles down the same lane and across the Strood, is Mersea Island and the salt water of the Blackwater and the Colne. Standing in the field you are roughly equidistant between the two.
Colchester is five and a half miles north. West Mersea, the fish and the oysters, is about ten minutes by car. The Plough, the pub at Peldon, is a seven minute walk from the gate.
A wonderfully secluded spot on the edge of Abberton Reservoir, a haven for bird watchers.
The site's own description of itself
Looking at this corner of Essex
Peldon is not an obvious place to go looking for a pitch. It is a lane, a church and a pub, and the sites around it are small, private and easy to miss: a field behind a farm, five vans and a standpipe, no sign on the road. The large listing sites are built around the parks on the coast and tend to skip straight past ground like this. Anyone working out what there is between the Blackwater and the Colne will get further with a directory that bothers with the small ones, and Camping Sites in Britain works through them county by county, which is the only sensible way to search a stretch of coast where most of what exists is a field with a tap.
The other half of it is the ground itself. A grass pitch a mile from saltmarsh in February is a different proposition from a serviced pitch in a holiday park, and most of the difference is kit and habit: what keeps a tent dry when the dew comes off seven hundred hectares of water overnight, what a windbreak is actually worth in an onshore blow off the Blackwater, whether the hardstanding matters more than the view. That is the sort of thing expert campers work out by doing it repeatedly, and it is worth more here than any single site's own description of itself.
These notes carry no pitch information beyond what the Camping and Caravanning Club and the site's own former website recorded, and no indication of what is open when. Both belong to the people who run the place.