I Am a Polar Bear

“A bedding roll”, you see on the Guide camp kit list. “What is a bedding roll?”, you ask. “How do you make a bedding roll?” And so you take to the internet for help and here I am!

The bedding roll is the most fearsome beastie Guide camp has to offer, partly, I suspect, because Guides leave it up to their parents to do it for them. If you need to take a bedding roll, the Guides will probably practice making them in a meeting and if your unit holds a parents’ meeting before camp, they’ll hopefully show you there. But you’re probably here because your Guide wasn’t paying enough attention and has no idea where to even start. So hi, let me help out.

A bedding roll rolled up in a black groundsheet and red cord, lying in the damp grass.

A bedding roll is simply your camp bedding rolled up into a waterproof bundle which is nice and easy to transport. It dates from the days when you would walk to camp carrying all your kit yourself, when there was a genuine chance of the thing falling into a river along the way. These days tents have built-in groundsheets but even in my own Guiding days, you needed your own groundsheet when you got to camp so you weren’t sleeping straight on the wet grass.

The bedding rolls remains in many units because it’s useful. First, because when we arrive on camp, all the kit tends to get thrown in a pile while the tents are pitched and if it’s raining, your bedding is going to get wet. You can always find dry clothes but if your sleeping bag gets wet, you’ve had it. So we tie them up like this to keep them dry. This year, we’re camping on an island so we have to transport them by ferry and then (hopefully) trailer so it’s extra-important that our bedding rolls are adequate. Second, it’s just that bit less bulky than bringing a separate sleeping bag, groundsheet and blanket. Third, lots of unit ask their girls to bring their bedding outside to air out first thing in the morning and that groundsheet will keep the bedding from touching the damp grass.

Not all units use bedding rolls in this day and age. There are plenty who consider them an old-fashioned and offputting relic of the past, who prefer the bedding to come in a big orange survival bag or a heavyweight gardening bag or something simpler. But if you’ve googled “what is a bedding roll?” and ended up reading this, then clearly your unit wants you to have one so let’s carry on with the assumption that you need to learn to make one.

There are four ingredients:

A pile of black groundsheet, red badge-covered blanket, sleeping bag in its stuffsack and handful of red cord lying in the grass.

A groundsheet or tarpaulin around 6ft square. Something waterproof and tough, so not a bin bag or a piece of the plastic sheeting you use when you’re painting a room. I personally prefer the non-woven kind but the smooth plastic kind does seem to be harder to find these days. Outdoors and DIY shops are good places to find this sort of thing.
A sleeping bag.
Yourcamp blanket.
A piece of cord to tie it all up with, at least two metres of it, preferably more. Not string or twine, please. String just turns into a mass of knots and has to be cut and therefore you can’t use it to tie up your bedding roll to bring it home at the end of camp. Outdoors shops sell things like paracord, lengths of cord meant for spare guylines, thin climbing rope (you don’t need the climbing-grade rope as thick as your thumb, just the stuff that’s slightly thicker than cord) – these are ideal but they do all fray when you cut them, so wave the ends over a flame for a couple of seconds to seal them.

These ingredients are combined as so:

Lay out your groundsheet. Fold your blanket in half lengthways and lay it on top, then the sleeping bag on top of it all, with the ends folded over so it’s all inside the groundsheet, as so:

My bedding roll laid out in the grass, unrolled. At the bottom is the groundsheet, then the camp blanket folded in half, with the sleeping bag laid out on top, its ends folded up so it fits within the space of the groundsheet.

There are two ways of folding. You can either fold the edges of the groundsheet to the middle and then fold the whole thing in half lengthways, or you can fold it into thirds. I’m using thirds here:

The bedding roll folded into thirds so the blanket and sleeping bag are entirely contained inside the groundsheet.

Pick an end, fold the groundsheet over to make sure the sleeping bag is fully enclosed and then start rolling. Roll it as tightly as you can, squeezing all the air out. When you reach the other end, fold the groundsheet again to enclose the end of the sleeping bag and wrap your cord around the whole bundle. You should have something that looks a bit like this:

A bedding roll made of a black groundsheet and tied with red cord. Its ends are neatly folded up and the knot is on the bottom today.

My old Guide handbook tells me you must tie it in a “packer’s knot” but I’ve never mastered it. As long as it holds, it doesn’t matter what knot you use or how unpretty it is. Cord like this is reasonably easy to untangle no matter how complex your knot but you can see how you’d end up having to cut this if you used string. If you have enough left, you can tie it into a carrying handle but the cord is supposed to be secure enough that you can just pick it up around the knot and carry it without it falling apart.

My hand and arm holding my bedding roll upside down by the knot. My foot is also visible.

I don’t say mine would survive being dropped in a river but I’m pretty confident I could leave that out in the rain for a while while I was taking the tent down, which is all that a bedding roll really has to survive in this day and age.

(Actually, I’ll tell you a secret. A year or so ago, I spent some time sewing together lengths of webbing and various buckles and clips and now my bedding roll has a harness. It holds it all so much more securely – but no one sells them, so you’ll have to custom-make one if you want one. If you camp regularly, especially with Guides, I’d recommend it, it’s been really handy. I even made a clip-on shoulder strap for ease of carrying.)

The same bedding roll but now tied up using a harness of rainbow-coloured webbing, which wraps twice around its width and once around its length. It

I know you have a couple more bedding-related questions:

Yes, bring a mat of some kind. Don’t try rolling it into the bedding roll, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work. A cheap foam mat is ideal (two on top of each other if you’re feeling luxurious), or a self-inflating one. Self-inflating mats are just foam which puffs up by itself when air is let into it by a valve. They pack down pretty small but when they’re self-inflated, they’re thicker and more comfortable than plain foam mats.

You can bring an air mattress but your Guide is probably going to have to inflate it herself with a footpump or handpump and that’s very hard work, not to mention that if it gets punctured, her bed is flat, cold and uncomfortable. And Guides do get overexcited in tents, so there’s a very real risk of punctures which is why I try to put Guides off bringing them. Besides, believe it or not, sleeping on a block of air is colder than sleeping on a layer of insulating foam.

No, a folding metal camp bed really isn’t suitable for Guide camp unless you have special needs, in which case discuss with your leaders.

Yes, please bring a pillow. I always forget that bit. My own old Guide leader always just brought a pillowcase and stuffed it with her spare clothes at night, which is a far more efficient way of getting a pillow but you’re very welcome to bring an actual pillow.

Yes, you can bring your teddy or whatever fluffy friend you prefer. Fluffy friends are always welcome at camp (but again, with the warning that camps can be dirty, muddy, wet places). I remember one camp with a cuddly bee that was fully half the size of its owner.

Yes, please bring a torch. Make sure your Guide has her own torch – I’ve had enough “this is my dad’s best torch, he’ll kill me for breaking it!” to last me a lifetime. These days with LED torches, the batteries should last the entire camp too. People think headtorches look a bit silly but they’re really useful for hands-free lighting so consider one of those for midnight toilet visits.