The original site, put back
The Gatehouse Peldon ran its own website until it went off the internet in 2025. Below is its home page as the family wrote it, recovered from web archive captures and set back out to be read.
Their words, their spelling, their punctuation, unchanged. The only things added are the headings that say where one capture ends and another begins. Nothing has been written in to fill a gap.
Home page as it stood, 6 March 2025
Rustic camping & caravanning at
The gatehouse peldon
Glamping & camping in rural Essex
The Gatehouse Peldon is a wonderfully secluded spot on the edge of Abberton Reservoir, a haven for bird watchers. With 6 acres of pastures it is a fantastic place to bring the children for a short break in the countryside, or to relax around a campfire with friends.
As a child, My sisters and I ran around the fields, hid in the tree lined belt and built dens all over the place. We were lucky enough to have an idyllic childhood one that we wanted for our children. We would very much like to share this freedom with you.
We are a family friendly site and love hearing children laugh as they build dens, run around and play football or just explore. With 6 acres of grassland with stunning views over Abberton Reservoirs we have plenty of wild life to keep everyone entertained. From the owls that hoot from the trees after dark to the muntjak that wander across the field. If you are very lucky you may even see a badger scamper in the field next door. My boys would be overwhelmed to show you the badgers latrine!
Surrounded by farmland we have miles of walks on our doorstep. We are perfectly situated for lovers of the countryside to escape and explore. The local pub, The Plough, is a 7 minute walk away where a warm welcome is always served. They boast a large beer garden in which to enjoy the sun.
Exciting Mersea Island is only a 10 minute drive away offering beautiful beaches, an enchanting harbour where you can go crabbing from the jetty and now a brand new boating lake offers water sports. Bring your paddle board and enjoy a day on the water. There is also 2 small supermarkets a brilliant fish and chip shop and a bakery.
Historic Colchester town is a short drive away, being Britians oldest recorded town it is heaped in history and still retains its Castle and many of the old towns Norman walls.
The Gatehouse Peldon is a family run business born from a vision to share our little piece of heaven with families wishing to make fabulous memories and enjoy a slower way of life without all the modern technology. My husband Bradley, myself Vicki and our 3 boys, Alfie, Toby and Kieran would like to invite you to come and stay on our meadows and enjoy the freedom we are lucky enough to cherish.
The footer carried a name, an address, a telephone number and an email address. The name and the address are on the record here: Vicki Scott, Lodge Cottage, Lodge Lane, Peldon, CO5 7PZ. The telephone number and the email address are not republished. They reach a family who can no longer take a booking, on a website they do not run, and putting them back out would only send calls to people who cannot help.
Recovered from the Internet Archive capture of 6 March 2025, the last one made while the site was still working. Captures from 11 May 2024 and 7 September 2024 carry the same text.
Before that, there was glamping
The July 2022 capture is a different page. Glamping had its own item in the navigation, the hero line read Rustic glamping & camping, and a paragraph named the three units by name. All of it was gone by May 2024: the menu item, the hero line and the paragraph.
What happened to the bell tents and the caravan is not recorded anywhere that could be found, so nothing is said about it here.
Home page, 16 July 2022
Rustic glamping & camping at
The gatehouse peldon
Whether it is camping or Glamping you are after we cater for both. We have a 5 van caravan site for camping and caravanning club members. As we are limited to 5 it keeps a nice atmosphere without being too busy. As for the Glamping we have a beautiful Bell tent, Bella & her new sister Belinda as well as a beautiful vintage caravan, Betty. We also have a horse box under conversion for, hopefully, next year.
One paragraph on the 2022 home page, deleted from the site by May 2024. The rest of that page is close to the 2025 text above, with one difference: the food at The Plough was credited to The Junkyard Smoke Bloke, and that credit was taken out too.
Four pages that could not be recovered
The old site had five pages. Only the home page was ever archived. Camping, The Little Extras and Contact have no captures at all, in any year, and neither does the Glamping page that the 2022 menu points to. They are gone, and no attempt has been made to reconstruct them.
That leaves a real hole. Everything the family wrote about the camping itself was on the Camping page, and nothing anywhere records what The Little Extras were. What is known about the pitches comes from directories rather than from them, and it is set out on the campsite page with the source named each time.
Two photographs were on the old home page, as CSS backgrounds rather than images. Neither was ever archived and both now return nothing. The site's own logo survived and is held on file, but it is not reproduced here: putting the family's mark on a website they do not run would tell readers this is their site, and it is not.
Where this came from
Internet Archive captures of thegatehousepeldon.co.uk dated 16 July 2022, 11 May 2024, 7 September 2024 and 6 March 2025. The domain stopped resolving to a working site after that. Directory records from the Camping and Caravanning Club, searchforsites.co.uk and ukcampsite.co.uk were used to check the details, never to add to the text above.
If you came here looking for somewhere to camp
The gate is shut, but the reservoir, the walks and the coast are all still there. These two will get you the rest of the way.