I tried a 'wild sauna' by a stunning Scottish loch and it took me back to my childhood

I grew up swimming in the sea, lochs and rivers in the days before it was considered ‘wild’. It was just the preferred location for children while their parents hunkered down at a distance on deckchairs behind a windbreak with a flask and newspaper “for a bit of peace”, until it was time to go home and you were allowed out of the water, red raw, aka ‘healthy’.

I don’t remember complaining about the temperature of the water, probably because my parents were ‘cold deniers’ who saw radiators as decorative rather than functional and a shivering child as one who needs to “put another jumper on for god’s sake what’s wrong with you?”

‘Pause, breathe and reconnect’

The realisation that Scotland’s waterways are, in fact, freezing a lot of the time came late when I first tried wild swimming as an adult. I had decided to give it a go for the mental health and skin-tingling benefits and discovered there were welcome advances like dry robes, hot chocolate and my new favourite, the wild sauna – like the mobile outdoor one, parked alongside a loch at Forbes of Kingennie in Angus, that I chose for my first experience.

It’s one of five operated by Wild Scottish Sauna – three by the sea and two on lochs – the genius brainchild of Jamie Craig-Gentles and Jayne McGhie, who “wanted to carve out a space to pause, breathe, and reconnect through fire, water, and nature”.

Their wood-fired mobile outdoor saunas are scattered along the east coast from Fife to Angus, nestled in the stunning natural environments at Shell Bay, Elie; Kingsbarns beach; West Sands beach, St Andrews; Eden Springs Loch near Cupar; and Forbes of Kingennie.

Fish splashing, wind in leaves

Forbes of Kingennie’s sauna is a pine-clad affair with a picture-perfect view of the loch alongside and a host, the welcoming Isla, who was on hand with advice, towels, water, herbal teas and refreshing slices of orange throughout our £16, 55-minute visit for a ‘social sauna’, which we shared with two friendly strangers.

What better opportunity to launch myself back into cold water swimming, with the promise of a sizzling sauna to heat up between dips? I surprised myself by repeating the steam and cool off process more than once and swimming out into the loch.

Looking back at the sauna hut on the shore and obeying the exhortation on its side to “let go and breathe”, I basked in the early autumn sunshine and enjoyed the calm, the only sounds the distant thwack of a golf ball, the splash of a fish surfacing and the wind swishing the leaves of surrounding trees.

Had such a thing existed in my parents’ day, I know where they would have been.