The Book of the Bivvy. Ronald Turnbull

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      Ideal bivvybagging in the Picos de Europa, Spain

      A saucepan liner cut from the London blanket turned out to be just the thing. It shrivelled above the soup-line, but held below. The moral? Anything’s useful, so just take whatever weighs least…

      However, for serious survival (which means survival of snowstorms) you need a serious survival bag and this weighs 300g/10oz. This is thick enough to hold in heat as well as air, and stiff enough that the breeze won’t mould it against your body. The books say you should bite a hole in the corner of it to breathe through and then enter it head first. This makes sense: warm air rises and stays in the bag. However, I’ve never been quite desperate enough to bite a hole in something that cost me five shillings.

      Two are not twice as warm as one in a bag, unless the bag’s a very big one. If the bag gets tight it compresses your clothing and the bits of you pressing against the outside get very cold indeed. There are, however, group bags: these are specifically designed for several people to get miserable in together.

      PLASTIC BAG FOR PLEASURE PURPOSES

      Some of us are too mean to buy a proper bivvybag, and some of us just like to see how much we can do without. I come into both categories. So here is the technique for primitive plastic travel.

      If plastic bags get wet on the inside, the way to stay dry is to stay outside the bag. A foam mat is one of the things you probably didn’t bring, and the double layer of plastic underneath is insulation of a sort as well as groundsheet.

      When it starts to rain, you can postpone the damp by moving under a nearby tree. When the rain starts to drip through the leaves, it’s just possible it may already have finished raining outside.

      Otherwise, it’s time to get into the bag. Position it with the feet end slightly uphill. This means that condensation in the bag has a chance to trickle out the entrance. It also means that raindrops on the outside will drip off the doorway rather than trickling back inside. If you hold the entrance well open, air can get in and evaporate some of the condensation.

      You wake up moist but warm. It’s the next night, the crawling back into a bag that’s already damp, that’s going to be really horrible. So the advice is not to do that next night, but to head off the hill to civilisation with its youth hostels and shops selling proper breathable bags.

      However, it may quite possibly not rain at all. In which case you simply keep going until you run out of muesli. You lie late to let the sun take the dew off the plastic, amble down to the village whose lamps had lightened your night-time, and discover that, late though you lay, it’s still two hours too early for the shops.

      POLYBAG FACTS

      One night under the moon in a plastic bag should persuade you that you want more nights under the moon, but in something other than damp plastic. Rawhide? Potato sacks? Stout Harris tweed? In the next chapter we’ll study various historic bivvybags even less accommodating than polythene.

      Chapter 2 BIVVY HISTORY