‘It’s hard to believe there is a more charming, peaceful or relaxing campsite anywhere in Brittany’

Ninety minutes’ drive west from St Malo there is a campsite which has become our go-to place in Brittany to unwind.

We found Milin Kerhe by chance, 10 years ago, when Nikki had almost but not quite given up trying to persuade me to resume camping after an irksome, indeed painful, stay at a site which on a good day, a very good day, might have been awarded half of one star if Jersey rated its campsites that way.

Actually, in France they are rated that way, and Milin Kerhe has only two stars, but in its case that’s the whole point, for it’s hard to believe there is a more charming, peaceful or relaxing campsite anywhere in Brittany. GPs should consider prescribing stays at this place for those who need time away from the rat race.

Milin Kerhe’s natural advantages, including a stunning woodland on three sides and the beautiful, salmon-rich River Trieux yards from tent pitches, with a small safety fence in between, rest assured, have been complemented by just the right amount of development by the Franco-British Low family who have run it since 2011.

As they have said themselves about their site: ‘If you are looking for five stars, a water park and a booming discotheque, Milin Kerhe is definitely not for you. However, if you would like to see thousands of stars above a bubbling river, to the intermittent owl toot, then it might be just what you are looking for.’

Milin Kerhe is in the commune of Pabu, in the middle of Cotes d’Armor, one of Brittany’s four departments, easily accessible via our recently renewed daily ferry link which the island and regional authorities are keen to use as a platform for more co-operation and a deeper partnership.

Guingamp, a beautiful and vibrant medieval town of timber-framed houses regularly rated as one of the best in Brittany to explore on foot, is only a few minutes away. An unfortunate accident in the 16th century resulted in the unusual architecture of its delightful Basilique Notre Dame de Bon Secours, Gothic on one side and Renaissance on the other.

Prisons do not frequently feature on tourists’ itineraries, but in this part of the world La Prison de Guingamp should. Built in the 19th-century style known as Pennsylvanian, including the then avant-garde detention of prisoners in individual cells which was thought more likely to promote penitence, it is the only one of its type in Europe preserved in an original state. Following its restoration, one of the central courtyards also boasts a fabulous art centre dedicated to contemporary photography.

Now, the football. There must always be football. Guingamp is one of the smallest towns in Europe to have had a top-tier professional football team. They are currently in Ligue 2, but looking good for a place in the promotion play-offs. Of course we couldn’t pass up the chance to watch them at the impressive Stade de Roudourou, which has a capacity nearly three times the population of the town, as they outclassed Troyes 4-0.

In the four years we have visited Milin Kerhe, many of those staying on the 50-odd pitches have been families with young children, often Dutch families, who seem to head to campsites in the northern half of France in extraordinary numbers every summer. This makes for a lively and sociable atmosphere, but without compromising the sense of nature and peacefulness.

I’m sure there are no academic studies into camping and kids, but it is obviously good for them. There is the freedom, the adventure and the new friendships, often formed in unlikely circumstances and through language barriers, and if you plan well there is no wi-fi, which creates space for board games, conversation, reading books and staring at the stars.

Just before heading off last summer, I was reading The Anxious Generation, in which the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores two distinct crises – digital under-parenting, by which he means giving kids unlimited and unsupervised access to devices and social media, and over-parenting in the real world, which involves trying to protect kids from every possible harm. The result, he suggests, is an epidemic of young people suffering from addiction-like behaviours and unable to handle challenges and setbacks which are a normal part of everyday life.

We started camping because it was the affordable way of enjoying an extended holiday, but I hope that our Augusts in France over the past decade, even if slightly accidentally, have been a useful and rewarding, if all too temporary, antidote to the magnetic attraction of devices which even we Millennial parents, born between 1981 and 1996, are ill-equipped to deal with.

Talking of cost, for our family of five last summer, with children then aged 17, 14 and five, a total of five nights at Milin Kerhe cost just under £200, though we could have reduced that by about £25 if we had chosen a pitch without electricity. It’s brilliant value for money.

The cost is partly down to the limited development of the site I mentioned earlier. Which basically means a single block of showers and washing facilities in a converted barn, no mobile home or chalets, only small caravans, and no entertainment hub or restaurant, although on most evenings in the high season there is a convivial atmosphere around a food truck from where the owners serve galettes and crepes or fish and chips. The barn is roofed but cubicles do not have their own ceiling. Hand soap is provided, but not toilet paper. Look, it’s rustic and homespun, but it’s clean. And after that half-of-one-star-if-they’re-lucky-on-a-very-good-day experience, we learned an important lesson of tent camping – extremely basic facilities kept clean are fine, whereas facilities developed beyond a site’s maintenance budget, and therefore frequently grubby, are definitely not fine. At first it may feel a little odd to have to carry a toilet roll from your pitch on one side of the site to the facilities on the other side, but it is a small price to pay if they are clean when you get there.

Milin Kerhe was the first campsite we visited outside the Channel Islands. Since then, we have stayed on 17 sites all across France, sometimes in our own tent, sometimes glamping, with the occasional house rental in between. Safari tents – usually larger canvas structures supported by a frame of wooden posts which are glamping in every sense – have become our favourite, but there is still something special about fully DIY camping, proper camping you might say, and in any event there seem to be fewer safari tents available in Brittany than further south.

At first, we made many mistakes, but we have since learned a lot. By which I really mean that I made many mistakes which Nikki has since learned how to avoid to make the most of our camping holidays to France. There are doubtless still tips we could pick up from people who have been heading off annually for years or even decades longer.

We are still in the same middle-of-the-range tent which Nikki bought when we started. So that was a success. Maintaining a tent, making necessary repairs quickly and storing it correctly are probably of more use than buying one of the many ostentatious types increasingly available with prices to match. But the basic sleeping bags and the thin air beds which left us too close to cold ground, a combination which I’m certain nearly froze us to death on one particularly cold night, remembering that Brittany is not the Cote d’Azur, and the camping chairs so low they were impossible to sit in to eat – my purchases, I’m afraid – have all long gone. You learn where you need to spend a bit more, and well-lined sleeping bags, thick air mattresses and comfortable chairs with adjustable heights are essential. At night, our formula is that for every one blanket you find it necessary to sleep under, put two on the ground underneath, to prevent cold ground chilling the air in the mattress. Also long gone are the basic and then advanced cool boxes which, even in Brittany, didn’t really keep food fresh enough to allow us to eat mainly on site and avoid expensive meals out each night, replaced by a table-top fridge from Decathlon – surely every camper’s favourite shop in France – which was less expensive than the last of the cool boxes we tried.

Years earlier when we hired sites’ own tents – not to be recommended, in our view, unless you are very unfussy – we learned that there was never quite enough room. When purchasing your own tent, it is a good idea always to upsize by one, buying a four-man tent if there are three of you, a six-man tent for the five of us, and so on. Laying down a soft, polyester, removable carpet makes it easier to keep the tent clean and provides additional comfort in the non-sleeping section. But a tent is a tent, not terribly roomy, and on a sunny day too warm by mid-morning, even in Brittany, to want to spend much time inside. We found that quite restrictive, until one year we treated ourselves to one of our wisest camping purchases, an event shelter, a portable, lightweight canopy with anything from no sides to four sides which we put up right outside our tent to provide shelter from the elements and create a decent-sized space to play games, read, eat and even cook and house a flat-pack pantry, without which food storage and preparation are unnecessarily awkward.

On our first camping trip south, we stayed on a wonderful site but had a less than ideal pitch. Nikki then discovered that most campsites publish maps of all their pitches, though not always in easily accessible sections of their websites, and that there can be a big difference in the characteristics of different pitches hired out at the same price. She now spends days every autumn studiously assessing pitch-by-pitch maps all over the country until she finds not just the right sites but exactly the right pitches at the right sites, taking into account their size, shape, aspect and proximity to neighbours, activity centres and walkways. Looking carefully at site maps before booking can make the difference between a week next a noisy toilet block and a week peacefully overlooking beautiful countryside, without needing to spend a single additional euro. We have become the camping equivalents of those lucky people who turn up at hotels and find they have been put in the corner suite for the same price as the modest double rooms everyone else is in.

If your budget can stretch to a trailer, get one. On our first few visits, we were loaded up like the Beverly Hillbillies, but this became less practical as our eight-year-old and five-year-old grew and were joined by a third child. The five of us have been able to continue getting ourselves and our camping equipment around thousands of miles of France for a month at a time in a relatively small saloon car by adding the space of a trailer bought locally for £100. A trailer may be less necessary if travelling relatively shorter distances in Brittany, or when glamping with more equipment supplied on site, but for long stretches of DIY camping in numerous locations it’s worth the investment. Although it doesn’t take away the jigsaw of loading the car – clothes and towels in vacuum-packed bags, sleeping bags rolled flat to line the boot, everyone’s supplies in boxes and no individual bags – which Nikki has mastered and I, ashamedly without much effort to learn, have not.

Before leaving Milin Kehre, which is always slightly sad, I must mention its proximity to the Cote de Granit Rose, the Pink Granite Coast, one of the most celebrated stretches of coastline in Brittany, indeed in all of France, due to its unusual pink sands and sculpted rock formations. The range and almost numinous beauty of the beaches, the walks and the islets and the charming towns of the coast – such as Tregastel, Perros-Guirec and Ploumanac’h – and Lannion, the capital of one of Brittany’s nine traditional provinces, which is on the way if driving the roughly 40-minute route north west from Milin Kehre, are together simply unmissable. If I was ever forced – forced(!) – to choose a location for a home in France, the bastide towns of the Lot-et-Garonne and the Dordogne would take some beating, but Brittany’s Cote de Granit Rose would come very, very close.