The rejuvenating joy of an off-grid holiday

Lisa Wright ditches her phone and heads into the nature-first wilderness of Unyoked escapes
Unyoked
Lisa Wright13 June 2023

Rounding the corner of the woodland path we’d been dropped off at to find a quaintly picturesque cabin nestled amongst breath-taking acres of tree-lined wilderness, it was an irony not lost on me that Unyoked — a getaway designed to separate the chronically online from their screens and put them back in touch with nature — would be an absolute smash on the ‘Gram.

The first rule of Unyoked, however, is that you do not immediately post about Unyoked, and so my phone remained smouldering unhappily in my pocket, with the idea that it would stay there for the next 48 hours.

First launched in Australia in 2016 by brothers Chris and Cam Grant, the company was created — so goes the website’s science bit — to “help us all understand how nature can make us better and allow us to weave it into our lives easily, and regularly”. Matthew McConaughey liked it so much he collaborated with them on his own New Zealand destination cabin and, last summer, they opened their first locations in the UK: 10 plots dotted across North Norfolk, the Black Mountains in Wales and the South Downs — my escape of choice.

Happy isolation at Unyoked
Intone Films

Unyoked have been smart in the way they’ve angled the package to make it appealing for frazzled city-dwellers who couldn’t tell their kindling from their Kindle. Though the end points are remote, with no other houses or humans in easy walking distance, each location is readily accessible from a train station (ours was a mere 15-minute taxi ride from Haslemere — itself less than an hour from Waterloo). The cabins, meanwhile, are styled in a manner that we’ll call covert luxury: there’s an emphasis on analogue fun, with playing cards, UNO and a cassette player provided, but you’re hardly roughing it. The sleek black and gold shower was more powerful than the one in my flat.

Which is all to say that these stays aren’t meant to be an endurance test of your ability to survive in the wilderness. They’re designed to be cosy and relaxing and — sorry to bring a thankfully dwindling buzz-word back into rotation — the definition of ‘hygge’. Inside was a wood-burning fire and a pair of Nordically-patterned hot water bottles; the vast, floor-to-ceiling windows bordering two sides of the bed meant you were basically sleeping amongst the trees. I brought my pregnant friend along and half-expected a consort of nearby birds and woodland creatures to come and dress her in the morning, such was the dreamy picturesqueness of it all.

It’s been proven time and time again that communing with nature can do wonders for your body and brain, lowering your blood pressure, enhancing your immune system and reducing anxiety. A study cited by Unyoked found that, of the 20,000 people tested, those who spent two hours a week in nature were consistently healthier and happier than those who didn’t. Preparing myself for literally 24 times that amount of sweet sweet earthy fraternising, I was ready for my serotonin levels to go through the roof. High on nature’s supply, I was down to embrace everything that the land had to offer me (after a stop for supplies at Waitrose).

Inside one of the hygge huts
Intone Films

Amongst the spectrum of the modern tech-obsessed, I would class myself as relatively low-end. I still prefer physical books; I happily deleted Instagram for three months at the end of last year; the increasing infiltration of Chat GPT gives me The Fear. And yet, settling in and manually tuning the radio whilst singing jingles to try and remember the frequency for Magic FM felt like a nostalgic blast from childhood — the little fizz of excitement as the strains of Hall & Oates crackled into life hitting in a far more visceral way than just pressing a pre-set button could.

I cannot overstate how happy and capable building a fire and cooking our dinner — a whole stuffed sea bass, no less — on it made me feel. For any Londoner whose practical skills amount to a dead tomato plant, an expired provisional licence and an abandoned Youtube tutorial titled ‘Why is my boiler making that noise?’, the act of sitting atop a tree stump, tending to your fire pit as the sun sets will make you feel like god, or Bear Grylls. We ate outside wrapped up in blankets and went to sleep knackered with that specific kind of outdoorsy tired you just don’t get in the city.

Admittedly, when Day Two brought with it an onslaught of pissing rain that began at lunch and didn’t bother stopping, the lure of the internet was a little higher. Instead, I set myself up by the open door with a chair, a book and a mug of red wine, and enjoyed the patter of the rain. I forced myself to stop thinking what the next activity would be and just went with the flow. As my friend took a nap, I looked outside at the big old trees in the big old earth and felt a genuine sense of calm. A lot of Unyoked’s rhetoric is about perspective — of repositioning life’s daily stresses as tiny molehills in the big mountain of the universe. Sat at home in South London, trying to meet a deadline, the logic seemed quite irritating; sat in my little cabin, I started to understand what they meant.

Immersed in nature
Intone Films

Mornings are of a premium in the countryside, especially when you’re in a secluded bit of woodland that could quite easily turn from Snow White to Blair Witch if you strayed too far in the dark. We went to bed early and woke up early, filled with an unnerving sense of 7am joie de vivre a world away from my usual nocturnal London lifestyle. Maybe I could be a country person, I pondered, attempting to start a final morning fire to griddle a toastie and feeling rather smug about the entire wholesome endeavour.

As the clock ticked towards our 10am taxi pick-up, however, my fire-making skills — truly heroic only two nights previously — had entirely disappeared. As if to really hammer it home, the gas ran out before we could even grill our breakfast on the hob. And yet, despite finishing an otherwise idyllic trip with a cold shower and a sad, flaccid sandwich of half-warm bread, I still felt completely zen. I’m not pretending I could live like this forever, but throwing myself into the spirit of the adventure for a couple of days had been easy; I hadn’t felt the usually-omnipresent urge to check my emails at all.

Since being home, naturally I’ve sunk back into the usual modern life patterns — Gmail and Zoom and Twitter and Google — but I really do feel like the experience has stuck. When everything gets a bit much, I try to remember the stillness and calm of the woods and remember that life is, in the words of McConaughy himself, alright, alright, alright…

Other off-grid breaks

Romney Marsh shepherd’s huts

Share a field with the local ewes at this Kent wetlands getaway; romneymarshshepherdshuts.co.uk

Canopy & Stars

With an entire section dedicated to treehouses, you can soar (or at least sleep) with the birds on these glamping trips; canopyandstars.co.uk

Gwalia Farm

A lakeside cabin in the Welsh countryside - with an added hot tub! gwaliafarm.co.uk

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