Hawkhirst, the scout camp on the north shore of Kielder Water, is to be redeveloped as a wellness retreat, it was confirmed this week. The seventy-acre Forestry Commission holding of sitka and larch has taken troops from across the North since the early 1980s. The lodges and the old hall are to be kept. The canoes, the climbing wall and the tented village are to come out.

A spokesman for the concern taking the lease said the word wellness covered “sitting still, walks, and the water.” Meditation would be offered in the hall on Saturday mornings from April, without charge, so that people from the valley might see what was meant. Booked groups would still be received in the school holidays. “Hawkhirst has always been a place to get away from it all,” he said. “We are not changing that. We are changing what people do when they get there.”

The camp stands a short way from Plashetts, on the Kielder road, and is easily passed if you are looking for a painted board of the ordinary sort. Brown signs, where they remain, still read Scout Camp. The operators say these will be altered in due course. There is a hard standing for a few motors; the rest of the approach is forest road, and walkers from the village are asked to come by the shore path rather than the rides if the timber is running.

A camp before the water

Hawkhirst was in use as a camp before Kielder Water was filled. When the Queen opened the reservoir in May 1982, a flag was raised at the site and Kielder scouts took boats out so that the water should look busy. Older residents remember canvas in the rides and a field kitchen; the lodges came later, and a jetty after that. For a generation of Northumberland troops the ordinary week was wet feet, a wide game, and a night under a sky that did not need a name.

Mrs L. Robson of Falstone, who has taken Plashetts and Falstone scouts to the camp since 1984, said the news had been talked of since Christmas. “The boys will miss getting wet,” she said. “The ground is the same ground. I am glad it is not to be chalets.” Parish opinion, so far as it has been taken, is divided in the usual way. Some are glad of any use that keeps the buildings in repair. Others say a scout camp is a scout camp, and that sitting still by the water is a poor substitute.

A Romano-British enclosure, scheduled since 1963, lies a hundred and fifty yards east of the hall, on what was once a north-east slope looking down the North Tyne and is now the edge of the water. The earthwork is not part of the retreat. Visitors are asked not to walk the banks of it. The operators have been told the same.

Saturday sessions begin on the first of April, at ten. Names are not required. The stove in the old hall will be lit if the morning is cold. Those who have no motor may leave word at the Plashetts desk; a lift is sometimes going that way. The number in the book is the desk number.