We talk to Alastair Sawday, founder of the Special Places to Stay guidebooks and the new luxury camping website Canopy & Stars, about his childhood spent in trees.

We’ve heard that you liked building inventive tree houses as a young boy…
My first ‘tree house’ was actually more of a den – a few planks up in the canopy with a rope ladder for my friends and me to scramble up and down. But as I grew older I became more ambitious – one even had a little sofa, and running water! I was very resourceful as a boy… I was often intercepted by my mother, carrying armfuls of things taken from the house and destined for the tree house I built at home. Perhaps my favourite was less a tree house, more a tree bed. It was a very comfortable bed hauled to the top of a tall pine overlooking a valley. I remember revising for my French A-level up there one hot summer. There I would lie all day in the sun, naked, reading Moliere at my leisure and fearing no interruption. I’m not a purist when it comes to tree houses. Why stop at houses? I love the idea of putting all sorts of things up in trees, perhaps as modest as a simple chair or as complex as a sauna.

What did you do once the tree houses were built? My brother and I often slept out in ours overnight…
Well, as you are hinting, it was the construction that was most fun, but that tree platform for my A levels was used for hundreds of quiet hours of study.

Are you tempted to keep playing in trees as a grown man?
Yes – whenever I get a chance I’m up a tree, though at 65 I am less agile than I would like to be. I am going to keep on popping down to Harptree Court, to see how our tree house there is progressing (we’re building one for our new camping venture Canopy & Stars). It set me alight again as soon as I saw the legs go up. Next time I go there I hope to take my first steps on the platform.

Did you love playing outdoors in general, or was it just trees that held you captive?
I was lucky to grow up in rural Suffolk, close to the estuaries of the coast. I spent much of my childhood mucking about in boats – exploring the length of the rivers, getting into trouble and generally wallowing in the freedom of it all. I became especially attached to the hours of dusk, when the birds would begin settling into the trees and the duck would wing their way inland. My mother still lives there and when I visit her I like to be out by the river as darkness descends…

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