Why the ground decides your night

You can carry a beautifully engineered tent, pitch it drum-tight, and still spend the night creeping slowly towards your own feet. On a multi-day walk, sleep is the currency that keeps everything else working, and the quality of that sleep is decided in the few minutes before you pull a single peg out of the bag. Five centimetres of buried rock under a thin mat becomes a fist-sized boulder by two in the morning. A slope you barely noticed in the evening becomes a slow slide into the doorway. Do the faffing early, while you still have daylight, patience and warm hands.

Read the ground before you unclip anything

Crouch down, or better still lie flat, and look along the surface. Slopes are almost invisible from standing height, which is why so many people discover their pitch is on a camber at midnight. Walk a slow zigzag across your chosen patch, feeling with your boots for humps, dips and tussocks.

Worth noticing:

• Bare, compacted earth — often the flattest ground, but check it is not a path or a drainage line.
• Tussocks of grass and heather, which look soft and sleep like lumpy pillows.
• Molehills, which are always fresh and always in the one flat spot.
• Deer or sheep paths, which tend to follow the contours and can be surprisingly level.
• Dry stream beds and gravel fans, which are dry only until it rains.
• Overhanging branches and dead wood, which come down when the wind gets up.

If you can, arrive with half an hour of light to spare. Choosing a pitch by torchlight is how most bad nights begin.

Slopes: sleep across, not along

On a gentle slope, the classic trick is to pitch across the fall line, so your body lies level while the ground runs downhill beside you. Keep your head on the uphill side and you will feel far less like you are sliding out of the tent. Use spare clothing or a soft rucksack as a pillow, and fill the gap under your hip with a folded fleece or your waterproof.

Pitch along the slope only if the gradient is genuinely slight — a one-in-twenty fall at most — and even then, spend a minute lying down to test it. Anything steeper and you are looking for a natural shelf, a small terrace, or a flat patch behind a boulder. Digging hip holes is best avoided in most British upland areas: it damages fragile vegetation and starts erosion. Adjust yourself and your kit instead.

Stones, tussocks and soft patches

Sweep the area with your hand as well as your boot; fingertips find what boots forgive. Move loose surface stones, but leave anything embedded in the ground — that is bedrock or a substantial rock, and levering it out creates a hole and a mess. If you cannot avoid a lump, sleep with it beside your hip rather than under your shoulder blades.

Soft, boggy ground is the other extreme. Pegs pull out, poles sink, and the mat compresses unevenly. Long pegs angled shallowly, rocks placed over the peg heads, and extra guy lines all help. Avoid deep moss and wet hollows: they are cold, they collect condensation, and they can collect water too if rain arrives in the night.

Hollows, ditches and drainage lines

Cold air is heavy and behaves like water: it sinks and pools. A hollow that feels sheltered and cosy at dusk can be the coldest spot on the hillside by dawn, and the same still air gathers midges in summer and condensation all year round. Pitch on a convex shelf, a knoll or a slight shoulder of ground instead, and stay a metre or two above the valley floor. Avoid anything that looks like a channel, however dry it seems, and never pitch in a gully or stream bed when rain is forecast.

Pitching with the weather in mind

Think about where the wind will come from, and match your pitch to it. Aim the lowest, strongest end of the tent into the wind, keep the door on the sheltered side, and use every guy line you have — pegs set at an angle, lines well spread, tension firm without straining the fabric. A boulder, bank or outcrop a few metres away can blunt the worst of the gusts, though keep clear of lone trees and anything with dead limbs above you.

Leave no trace: no trenches dug around the fly, no cut vegetation, nothing left behind but flattened grass. Then lie down inside one last time to check your head is not on a slope, shuffle your kit into the porch, and settle in. A few quiet minutes of care here buys you a far better morning on the hill.