On Friday 17th October 13 scouts set off on a camp to the Gwent County Campsite at Tintern. The main theme of the camp was scouting skills. As there wasn’t a huge amount of scouts on this camp we decided to have them put up hike tents to sleep in and then have a patrol tent to practise on later in the camp. We had our traditional first night supper of burgers with onions before the scouts were sorted into patrols and then sent off to bed.

Saturday

On Saturday morning we were aiming to have breakfast by 9am and for once the scouts actually managed to do this on time. We had the usual sausages, bacon, mushrooms and eggs. We decided against having baked beans for this camp as they usually end up being burnt onto the bottom of the billie by the scouts. Less washing up! Once breakfast was cleaned up the scouts started their skills training. There were three sections set up, Ben doing axe, Paul doing saw and Derek doing knife training. The three patrols moved around all of these bases covering all of the basics that were needed for the next activity.

Next activity was backwoods cooking. Some groups did quite well lighting their fires; others struggled with the slightly damp conditions on the ground. The food being cooked on the fires included bananas with chocolate, apples with chocolate and potatoes with chocolate (weird). Also there were just plain baked potatoes and potatoes hollowed out with an egg broken into the middle and then cooked. Following on from this the scouts were given some free time before one patrol lad to start cooking tea. Tea on this occasion was fish fingers, potatoes and mixed veg. I think that we were all pretty stuffed after that and we even had some left over. So we decided that before pudding we would have a brief stroll around the orienteering course in the woods. I think that the scouts need a bit more navigation practise as the leaders found far more points than the scouts did. By the time we had returned Ben and Dan had made the pudding. We has again gone for the camp favourite of sponge flan covered with chocolate angel delight made with the juice of mandarin segments and then topped off with the orange segments and assorted sprinkles, then served with evaporated milk. (We like our flans we do) When the clearing up was finished the leaders got to work on fixing the oven door that had decided to fall apart during the cooking of tea.

Sunday

The main activity of Sunday was a hike. This hike would take us over to a shop in a nearby village called Llandogo. I don’t think that the scouts were expecting it to be such an uphill walk to go down to the river. At the halfway point in Llandogo we visited the local shop and probably doubled their number of customers for the day. We did gain a dog on the journey back which followed us from Llandogo all the way back to the campsite. I think the scouts named it Dino. Paul took it back to where we found it in the bus once we got back to the campsite. In total the hike covered about 4.3 miles according to the gps. It would have been longer that we walked because the gps doesn’t work well in the woods. In the end the hike took longer than we had expected so there wasn’t enough time to do the patrol tent pitching so we will have to leave that until next camp. We has a lunch of soup and rolls before we packed up the kit and set off for home.

Written by Ben George

Photos provided by Ben George and Paul Mugenyi.