Your Complete Guide to Outdoor Cooking in the UK
There’s a particular kind of smugness that settles over you the first time you boil a full kettle using nothing but three twigs and a handful of dry grass. No gas canister rattling around in your rucksack, no faff with regulators, just a little metal chimney doing something faintly magical with fire. That’s the appeal … Read more
Stand two campers next to a fire and mention kelly kettle vs ghillie kettle, and you’ll get a debate that rivals “gas vs charcoal.” Both are chimney kettles — clever double-walled devices that use twigs, pine cones or scrap card to boil water in a few windswept minutes, no gas canister required. They look almost … Read more
There’s something almost stubborn about a military hexamine stove. It has no batteries to charge, no piezo igniter to snap, no valve to seize solid with age. You fold it flat, you strike a match, and thirty years later it still works exactly the same way it did the day some quartermaster stamped it into … Read more
There’s a particular smell that every squaddie, scout leader and stealth camper knows instantly — a faint, fishy tang drifting from a mess tin balanced over a tiny fold of steel. That’s a hexamine stove at work, and despite decades of shinier gas-powered competition, it refuses to disappear from British kit lists. The best hexamine … Read more
There’s a particular kind of silence that settles over a hillside when the wind drops and all you can hear is a small blue flame doing its quiet work under a battered aluminium pan. That’s the trangia storm cooker experience in a nutshell, and it’s why the design has barely changed since a Swedish company … Read more
There’s a particular sound that means “camping trip” to several generations of British walkers, scouts and van-lifers: the soft hiss of a brass burner catching light, followed by the metallic clink of a windshield being clipped shut. That’s a Trangia doing what it’s done since 1951, and this trangia stove review exists because, frankly, the … Read more
There’s a specific kind of joy in watching a stove that weighs less than your phone charger bring a litre of water to a rolling boil on a wet Welsh hillside. That’s the appeal of the best ultralight gas stove: it disappears into your pack, then quietly does the one job that actually matters after … Read more
Somewhere on a wind-scoured bealach in the Cairngorms, a hiker is crouched behind a boulder, cupping their hands around a stove that simply will not stay lit. That scene, more than any spec sheet, is why the msr pocket rocket vs soto windmaster question keeps coming up in gear forums and pub conversations before big … Read more
Buy the wrong stove and you’ll find out at the worst possible moment — halfway up a Welsh hillside, wind screaming sideways, matches turning to mush in your pocket. This soto windmaster review exists because that scenario happens to more campers than manufacturers like to admit. Canister-top stoves look neat on a shop shelf, but … Read more
Right, let’s talk about the stove that quietly changed how a lot of us cook on cold, blustery hillsides. If you’ve spent any time trawling gear forums looking for a msr windpro ii review, you’ll already know the WindPro II has a cult-like following among winter campers, Duke of Edinburgh leaders, and anyone who’s ever … Read more