This tent, deep in the heart of the New Forest, is not like any I have seen before. It has real rooms for a start, and beds with pillows and duvets and crisp white sheets. It has an oil-burning stove for when the nights get chilly, and the canvas walls can be rolled up if the weather gets hot. There are stubby candles in pretty lanterns and electric lights with bamboo shades (the wiring is the old-fashioned kind, brown and twisted). The furniture is made from gnarled but polished wood. Outside, there's a toilet hidden inside a rickety grass-roofed shack, and a second, smaller tent where you can shower in a wooden tub under the stars. And all around, there is nothing but dense forest.
I've never seen anything like it, and yet I have a strong sense of deja vu. Then I get it: I have been transported back to the Saturday morning TV of my childhood; if this tent were up a tree, it could be the very place where Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan got all domestic with Jane.
They call it a Country House Hideout, and it is the brainchild of a Dutchman, Luite Moraal, and his British partner, Mark Gordon. The two met when they were working for Disney theme parks. Moraal left to open a string of upmarket campsites on farms in Holland, and the two men lost touch until, some years later, Moraal asked Gordon to help him bring the concept to the UK. Feather Down Farms was born.
It was a simple idea – big comfortable tents, with beds and flushing toilets, sited on working farms and "themed" as a farmhouse. The British middle class lapped it up. So much so, Gordon tells me, that although the chain was only launched in 2006, it has already "reached capacity" (there are only so many suitable farms with enough space to be had, he says). If the business was to keep on growing, Gordon needed a new concept.
The central idea – a luxurious tent in a beautiful setting – remained the same, but out went the mismatched chairs and homely cake tins and in came a new set of props: a wind-up gramophone, a telescope, an old-school microscope, a penknife, a compass and a ball of string. Country House Hideouts, Gordon explains, hark back to the Great Age of Exploration; when he kitted out the tents, he simply "imagined Livingstone and Stanley, and how they might have lived."
It's best not to think too hard about this – forget Stanley's brutal treatment of the Africans or Livingstone's missionary zeal. Country House Hideouts offers a nostalgic fantasy of Imperial England, when great explorers went to "dark continents" and got up to, well, all sorts of brave stuff. If Cath Kidston was the inspiration for Feather Down Farms, The Dangerous Book for Boys is the defining idea here.
Where else to pitch these tents than in the grounds of great English country houses, the very places these colonial adventurers of our imaginations left behind? So Gordon teamed up with a location finder and started looking for people who had a large property, a shortage of cash, and an obscene amount of land. There were plenty of takers, and Gordon plans to have the first 10 Country House Hideouts up and running by Easter 2010.
First up, Donald and Caroline Anderson, our hosts at Hamptworth Lodge. Theirs is a beautiful house – all red brick and timber – but what strikes you first is the size of the place. They say it has nine bedrooms, but it looks like it could sleep 100. It has a long, tree-lined drive, walled gardens and deer grazing by the wrought iron gates. Pheasant stroll about, waiting to be shot.
The lodge and its surrounding 3,000 acres has been home to the Anderson family for 200 years but to this generation it is not so much a home as a burden and a business. Inheritance tax (or, as Donald would have it, "STATE THEFT!") and how to avoid it figures large in their lives, as does the rolling repair bill for their "one and a half acres of roof". To pay for it all, the Andersons already run a country fair, raise partridge, and host an annual amateur dramatics production. So when Gordon suggested that they might let people camp on their land, they were ready.
And so it is that, for one weekend, the grounds of this great house are to be our campsite. The tent sleeps two families, so accompanying me and my two girls (Morag, 11 and Flora, 7) are my sister, her partner Mark, and their two boys (Connor, 6, and Harvey, 2). Mark hates camping – went once and vowed never to go again. My sister loves it, and is hoping this "glampsite" (minimal discomfort, more than a touch of glamour) will make him think again.
We wound the gramophone and played one of the battered 78s. The crackle and crooning did lend atmosphere, but also felt a bit silly. Gordon says the props are aimed at kids, really – they are there to provide an old-fashioned learning environment. The other things did seem to capture their imaginations, for a while at least. When we headed into the forest for our first walk, Connor was carrying the binoculars, Morag the penknife, Flora the compass and Harvey the magnifying glass. By the time we headed home, I was carrying the lot.
The fact is, the children were having far too much fun to bother with telescopes and string. They climbed trees, poked big sticks into muddy puddles and hunted for woodlice in rotten branches. They found treasures everywhere: a hornet with one wing, which buzzed furiously in circles on the forest floor; an iridescent beetle, with a belly like shot silk, which clicked when you held it close to your ear; and a perfect but stinking grey-green egg.
Back at the campsite, Harvey, wearing only a filthy T-shirt and a nappy, filled the teapot with mud, while the older ones built a den under a tree. They spent hours on it, and by the time we left the next day it had a carpet of bracken and a path outlined in tiny white stones.
The camp is carbon neutral. The stove uses biodiesal, the Aga is wood-burning. Another wood burner heats water for the shower. For the adults, this means there are a lot of fires to light. So while the kids played, so did we: we gathered wood, lit the range, and fussed over the flames, and lay the candlelit table while the supper – sausages from the farm shop – cooked.
All this was utterly absorbing. There was none of the discomfort associated with eating and washing outdoors – no plastic plates or rickety tables, no queuing at a communal sink to do the washing up – and the shower was one of the best I have ever had. My sister and I were in heaven, pottering about. More significantly, so was Mark.
After supper, we went for another walk. I'd forgotten how dark it gets in the country, and how quickly. We were soon hopelessly lost. Brambles snared our feet, pitch black trees seemed to be closing in. It was beginning to feel more like the Blair Witch Project than Swallows and Amazons, when we saw the silhouette of the old statue which marked the entrance to our clearing. The range was still hot enough to make hot chocolate.
I was woken up the next morning by a soft light filtering through the canvas and the sound of woodpeckers at work on the trees. Then another sound: Mark, desperately seeking coffee, trying to get the Aga going – not easy when it's full of last night's ash. It was an hour before he got his caffeine fix and nearly two before we sat down to his full English. Made with fresh bacon, eggs, milk and bread from the campsite's wonderful honesty store, it was delicious. Mark played it down – "If I was Bear Grylls, we'd be eating a deer by now" – but you could see that he finally understood the point of camping.
A little later my sister and I were chatting on the deck. Harvey was at our feet making mud pies again. The older ones were off playing in the woods somewhere. And there was Mark, hands and clothes covered in ash, chopping wood for another fire: there was no stopping him now. The children might have been just as happy staying in any old tent, but for adults, a good night's sleep and a little nostalgic nonsense can make all the difference in the world.
• Country House Hideouts (01420 549150, countryhousehideout.co.uk) has four Grand Explorer tents at Hamptworth, open until 31 October, from £265 for four nights (Mon-Thurs) or £345 per weekend. Details of a further 10 Hideouts, open from Easter to 31 October 2010, will be available soon. Tents sleep six, plus two in a smaller, adjoining tent.
