Sherwood Pines: Luxurious cabin in the woods near Nottingham had me feeling like a King
The juxtaposition between the remote surrounds and luxurious cabin is quite spectacular
Have you ever, in your low moments or sleepless nights, travelled in your mind to a wild, remote place?
An imagined retreat from the thousand multisensory strains and pressures of modern, urban life. Somewhere where you can be connected to nature again. Some mystical wilderness.
Perhaps it’s ancient memories, hard-wired in the genes, calling us back. To a time when we did live entirely in the wild. To a time when our regional ancestors lived in that great wilderness, that place of myths and legends, Sherwood Forest.
Well now, you can revisit that retreat of the mind, and make a home among the tall pine trees.
That’s the experience you feel, setting up camp - a luxurious camp - at the Sherwood Pines Forest Park in north Nottinghamshire.
Sherwood Forest was once a vast woodland of thousands of acres, with a longitude spanning the very north of the county down to the northern edge of the ancient town of Nottingham, where it yielded to a patch of pastoral land known as Forest Fields.
Today, like a great sea that finally ebbs forever, leaving a few isolated pools and lakes behind, the mighty forest has shrunk and receded down to all but pockets of woodland close to Mansfield and the medieval village of Edwinstowe.
Of these, there is the magnificent and eerily unspoiled forest known as Sherwood Pines. And within there is a wonderful place to retreat to where you can at once be both among nature and in the sweet relief of luxury.
The rental cabins aren’t cheap - they reach eyebrow-raising figures at peak times, even for four-night Monday to Friday stays. But they are extremely well fitted out.
Yes, outside the cabin all is remote and wild. The squirrels scurry up and down the pine trees, competing with the little robins and crows for snacks and treats among the leaves. The breeze sighs through the trees. Herds of wild deer roam the forest. At sundown, all the birds of the trees come together in chorus.
An escape that's fit for a King
But inside, you feel like you’re staying at the holiday home of a very wealthy friend who doesn’t like having cold feet - there’s underfloor heating - and doesn’t like to go without wi-fi or movies or microwaves, or a big shower the size of a walk-in wardrobe. Oh, and they insist on jumping in the hot tub every night.
There’s something of a contradiction there. Those who love to rough it in the wild would probably scoff. You can order groceries and takeaways through a screen on the wall of your cabin, for goodness sake.
But somehow you really don’t care when you’re lying in the hot bubbles, drinking bubbles, listening to the evening’s gentle birdsong, as the crows swoop high above you.
After all, this is a place where medieval monarchs came to play, established as hunting grounds by the Normans a thousand years ago. Why not live like a king for a few days?
For centuries monarchs from the bad King John to Henry VIII stalked the Sherwood deer. Yet, clearly, they did not get them all. Their heirs still roam through the pine trees by the dozen centuries later, wild, cautious, elusive; shaken, perhaps, by fearful ancient memories hard-wired into the genes, of royal hunters silently stalking them.
And other things remain. Such as the ruins of King John’s hunting lodge, built 800 years ago but still visible from the mound on which a disused railway once ran to the colliery at Clipstone.
It is not a place for the budget traveller. But what it lacks in affordability, it certainly compensates with decadence and comfort. And being self-catered - each cabin has a fully-fitted kitchen - you can control your costs once you’re there.
Modernity may have shrunk the ancient forest back to a shadow of its former self. But green pools of wilderness remain.
Among the shadows of those tall pine trees, in the gentle calm that falls over you on entering that mystical forest, you feel you have taken a transcendent journey into a wilder, and infinitely more serene past.