There's a thing that happens when someone stays in one of our bell tents for the first time. They walk in, stop, and look up. Canvas does that. A nylon tent is a piece of equipment and you're aware of it the whole time you're inside. Canvas is a room, and your brain files it differently within about four seconds.

We've had a lot of conversations about this round the fire, usually with people who camp a fair bit and have opinions, and it turns out most of the world arrived at more or less the same answer independently. A pole, a circle, canvas, fire outside. The details change enormously. The idea barely changes at all.

So this is a wander through the different versions of it. Partly because it's interesting, and partly because people ask us what a bell tent actually is roughly once a week.

What we've got here

Ours are 5 metre bell tents. One central pole, one shorter pole at the door, a circle of heavy canvas pegged out, and a zip-in groundsheet so nothing walks in overnight.

Inside there's a king size bed made up with proper linen, and enough floor left over that you can stand up, get dressed and move about without performing gymnastics. That's the bit that surprises people. A 5 metre circle is a lot more space than the number suggests. Then the kit to actually live: pots, pans, plates, cutlery, gas stove, a lamp, a cool box, and a pioneer grill for cooking over the fire outside. You bring a towel and a toothbrush.

Canvas behaves differently to nylon in ways that matter. It breathes, so you don't wake up in a condensation cave. It holds temperature better at both ends, cooler in afternoon sun and warmer at four in the morning. And it takes weather without the flapping and slapping that keeps you awake in a lightweight tent. The trade-off is weight. Nobody is carrying one of these up a hill. It stays where it's put, which is why glamping sites use them and backpackers don't.

Yurts

The Central Asian answer, and the oldest properly engineered one. A lattice wall, roof poles going into a central ring, felt or canvas over the top.

The difference from a bell tent is the vertical wall. A bell tent's canvas slopes from the middle, so the usable space shrinks as you go outwards. A yurt has straight walls for the first metre or so, which means you can put furniture against the edge and stand up anywhere in it. That's why yurts feel like buildings and bell tents feel like tents. Herding families moved them seasonally for centuries and they'll take a Mongolian winter, which is not something you'd claim for anything we own.

Tipis and lavvu

The tipi is the North American version, conical, and the important feature is that it was designed around an indoor fire. Smoke flaps at the top, adjustable to the wind. Everything else follows from that.

The Sami lavvu across northern Scandinavia is the same idea reached separately, lower and wider to sit better under Arctic wind. Both of them are genuinely built for fire inside, which is worth stating plainly because people occasionally get ideas about their bell tent. Do not have a fire in your bell tent. There is a fire pit outside your bell tent, which is where fire goes.

Safari tents

The colonial-era East African setup, which has since turned into most of what gets sold as luxury camping worldwide. Rectangular, big, usually on a raised timber deck, often with a bathroom section at the back.

These are the ones that stretch the definition. There's a version of a safari tent with air conditioning, a minibar and a plunge pool, at which point the canvas is decorative and you're in a hotel with soft walls. No judgement, it's a lovely way to be in a hot place, but it's a different activity to the one we're in.

Bothies and huts

Not canvas, but they belong in the list because they solve the same problem.

A Scottish bothy is a stone building left unlocked for anyone walking past. No booking, no fee, no facilities, a roof and usually a fireplace. The Norwegian and Alpine hut networks are the organised version. They're what a lot of our guests use in winter when they want to be out but don't want to be in a tent in February.

Desert camps

Then the dry-country version, which for a lot of people is the one that lands hardest.

Camps in the Thar Desert in Rajasthan are structurally the closest thing to what we do, just scaled up and dropped somewhere far stranger. Canvas, a fire, food cooked over it, and dunes instead of a meadow. Two things make them different in practice. One is temperature swing. It can be pleasantly warm in the afternoon and genuinely cold by two in the morning, in a way northern European camping never quite prepares you for. The other is the sky. There's nothing out there generating light for a very long way, and the Milky Way turns up as an actual band across the sky rather than something you have to squint for. If you've enjoyed a clear night in our field, that's the same experience with the volume turned up considerably.

Most people reach them as part of a longer Rajasthan trip rather than as a standalone thing. Operators running luxury private tours of India build a night or two of desert camping into wider routes that take in the forts and the cities, which is a sensible way round it. One night on the dunes is memorable. Four is a commitment.

Camping with animals about

Worth a separate mention because it's the version people find hardest to picture.

The one that keeps coming up in conversation here is a camp night with the elephants at a sanctuary in Jaipur, where you stay over at the site rather than doing an afternoon visit. It's run by a family from a mahout background, it takes rescued elephants, and it's had a no-riding rule since it opened. The appeal, from what people describe, is the ordinary part rather than the dramatic part. Being there in the evening and the early morning when nothing is being performed for anybody.

That's a fairly good description of why anyone camps anywhere, in fairness.

What all of them share

Strip away the differences and you get the same three things every time.

A soft wall, which changes how sound arrives and how you sleep. A fire, which changes what an evening is for. And no reason to look at a screen, which is the one that takes about a day and a half to take hold and is the reason most people book a second night.

Our version is 8 acres of Kent meadow, thirty two pitches, no cars, no wifi and no sockets. The equipment list is different everywhere else. The point is not.