19/08/2026
Three days at Knepp. No electricity, no wifi, no hot tap.
I went expecting to be uncomfortable. What I got instead was slow. Dinner took two hours because you cook it over a fire in a shared outdoor kitchen, or over one you built yourself, and you can't rush a fire. The bath is heated by wood you burn yourself — forty minutes to fill, an hour to warm. You earn the hot water at Knepp. Sitting in a bath with the smell of burning wood, looking out at wildlife in a woodland, is pretty special, let me tell you. Then the pond, which is not warm at all. But a swim in nature makes you feel alive and human.
By the second day I'd stopped reaching for my phone, because there was nothing to reach for. My wife Dipti and I ate breakfast on a deck looking at trees, and it took as long as it took. Same food I'd eat at home — homemade sugar-free granola, berries and kefir. Completely different nervous system.
There's decent evidence that time in nature may support lower stress and better mood — a large UK study found around two hours a week was where people started reporting better wellbeing (White et al., Scientific Reports, 2019). I'm not going to tell you a weekend in a tree fixes anything. I'll tell you I slept properly for the first time in months, and that it did something to me.
The land is the real story here. Knepp is a rewilding project — farmland handed back, left to do its own thing. Free-roaming deer, Tamworth pigs, thistles left standing and thick with bees. White storks breeding here for the first time in Britain in 600 years. We watched up to ten go over the field, and saw a nesting stork too.
You don't need a treehouse for any of this. Start with one evening. Cook something that takes time. Leave your phone in another room.
