"And so I raise this toast to Thomas Hiram Holding!" Cue mass clinking of glasses, a spontaneous outburst of cheering and a standing ovation from a grateful public.

If there were any justice in the world, this would be a common scene on campsites up and down the land each summer. Instead, the only things that get toasted are marshmallows. Meanwhile, the name of the man who singlehandedly invented the concept of camping for pleasure has all but faded.

Worse still, the unalloyed, freewheeling joy with which he imbued the pursuit is also in danger of being forgotten in our latter-day obsession with taking the wild, exuberant "ping" out of camping.

Holding's story is a remarkable one. A humble journeyman tailor, he gained a taste for the peripatetic lifestyle travelling around the US on wagon trains in the 1850s. So when it took his fancy to explore the Highlands of Scotland, he naturally decided to do so in a similar manner. Wagon trains don't really mix with mountains, so he settled instead for a canoe and a tent and off he went.

Many adventures later, including a camping tour of Connemara on a bicycle, he formed the Association of Cycle Campers to promote an activity viewed at the time as borderline eccentric.

Sadly, Britain is rather short on journeyman tailor-pioneers nowadays, but the organisation Holding founded – now called the Camping and Caravanning Club – boasts more than half a million members. Not a bad legacy, you might think.

However, it was on a bright Saturday afternoon last summer that I realised camping was actually in some trouble. Sitting by Stonethwaite Beck on a rambling campsite in the Lake District, I watched as a family began to pitch their tent, an edifice modelled on the Millennium Dome, only somewhat larger. A full two hours later they were still unpacking, presumably recreating inside the monolith an exact replica of their own home. I couldn't help thinking that it would have been less trouble for them to have brought the Dome itself.

And, large families excepted, don't get me going on the new phenomenon of people who like to book a campsite six months or more in advance. What's wrong with a bit of spontaneity? Of course, I realise that guides like this one, packed with dozens of tempting sites, might not ease the problem. But campsites, however glorious they may be, are a means to an end, and not the end itself.

So this year, why not take off without planning ahead, or bringing banana carriers and inflatable settees. Rather, when you're woken at home on a Saturday morning by the sun pouring through your window, leap up there and then, throw the bare necessities into a rucksack or panniers and take off. There's a field out there with your name on it, so enjoy the excitement of tracking it down.

Indeed – whisper it – there's actually no need to use a campsite at all. Every year I go wild camping with a friend and we always find it invigorating waking up in the midst of the countryside. It's legal too (with certain sensible caveats) in the whole of Scotland and a bit of Dartmoor. Elsewhere, if you take yourself somewhere suitably remote or high, pitch late, depart early, and leave nothing but your thanks, no one will ever know you were there.

When you arrive at your new home for the night, feel free to slow down. Humans have a terrible propensity to do, rather than be. The natural world, you'll notice, is a lot keener on just hanging about and taking it all in (with the possible exception of ants and wasps). Simply by lolling about quietly around my tent I've enjoyed close encounters with rabbits, Chinese water deer, a hedgehog, and even a mighty red stag.

Camping shouldn't be about whether you can nab a place at this year's campsite du choix, or about owning trendy gear or fretting about whether you'll have mobile reception; it's fundamentally a state of mind.

For inspiration we need look no further than Thomas Hiram Holding himself. He was an author as well as a tailor and clearly carried his philosophy of joyful simplicity into his writing. The book he wrote on coats, for example, he called "Coats". We could learn from that.

Dixe Wills is the author of Tiny Campsites (Punk, £10.95)