What with the cozzy livs and commuting and all that, city life can get a bit much sometimes. You might find yourself wishing you could throw your phone into the ocean or go live in the woods in the middle of nowhere. Well, it turns out there’s a bit of a market for that – sans phone-throwing – and it’s really catching on.
Unyoked is an Australian company offering city dwellers the chance to hide away in a cabin and immerse themselves in nature for the weekend. It now has cabins in different spots throughout the UK, including Norfolk and Wales, and they’re mostly reachable by a short-ish train journey from London or another major city. We popped down to our cabin in the South Downs National Park after work on a Friday. Simples.
The 20-minute cab ride from the station to the cabin cost an eye-watering £28 each way, something you definitely might want to bear in mind as an extra expense when choosing your spot. Arriving in the dark is vaguely horror movie-esque, but the bright yellow ‘Unyoked’ signs quickly remind you that you’re not quite as in the middle of nowhere as it seems in the dark. I wondered whether we’d be able to spot signs of life from where we were staying (I hoped not), but although you pass a whole house and another Unyoked cabin on the way, once you reach it, you really do feel isolated.
The cabin is cute and shed-like, with a tiny little kitchen, fridge and shower room. You can tell every detail has been well thought through; coffee beans come with a manual hand grinder, while the cupboard is stocked with tin camping mugs. If you kind of want to go camping but can’t face actually going camping, this is the place. (Yes, the toilet is compostable.)
Tucked away in drawers you’ll find a hammock, picnic blanket and a load of delightfully random games (including, bizarrely, Pass the Pigs, which I hadn’t played since I was a kid). There are a few books and a radio, so I listened to a programme about how to make béchamel while I cooked breakfast. Dreamy stuff.
Once you settle into the feeling of doing nothing, you find that you don’t reach for your phone anyway
Outside the front door is a fire pit surrounded by tree stumps, plus an actual little table and chairs, if you’d rather. Indoors, meanwhile, there’s a wood-burning fireplace. Don’t panic, even the most seasoned city dwellers among you will be able to make a little fire for it, thanks to a bag of kindling and firelighters. There’s even a little book to write about your feelings, lists of birds you might spot and trees you can look out for, if you’re into that sort of thing.
But the Unyoked cabin’s greatest asset? That will be the bed, tucked snugly in the corner and sandwiched between two huge windows which give out onto the surrounding forest. Seriously soft white bed sheets are covered with a thick throw, so you can have your main-character moment with a cup of tea when it’s all misty outside. We saw lots of little birds and a deer (an actual deer!) even skipped past the cabin.
During the day, you can walk for hours in the woods and see bluebells, or do a longer walk to a nearby town and sit in a pub. You can get signal and internet on your phone in the cabin, but it’s patchy and certainly not fast enough to watch videos or browse Instagram and Twitter (if you’re anything like me, that’s a blessing), so no doom-scrolling in sight. But really, once you settle into the feeling of doing nothing, you find that you don’t reach for your phone anyway. Trust us, you’ll return after a weekend of woodland walks and playing cards feeling seriously chilled out.
Cabins are available to book via the Unyoked website. Prices start at £154 for weeknights and £179 on weekends.
Want more cabin inspo? Here are the 12 cosiest cabins in the UK according to us.