Light matters more than you think after dark

November in the Lake District gives you darkness by half four. You reach the bothy or pitch the tent at five, and suddenly everything you still need to do — cook, filter water, find the trowel, read a map, walk fifty metres to the tarn for a wash — depends on one small plastic thing strapped to your head. A head torch is the piece of kit you use more than any other on a wild camping trip and think about least when you buy it. Getting it right is the difference between a pleasant evening and an hour of swearing at a dying beam.

The good news is that you do not need to spend much. The bad news is that the specs on the box — usually a big, shouty number in lumens — tell you almost nothing useful. Here is what actually matters.

Beam patterns: spot, flood and the useful middle

Lumens measure total output, not how the light is shaped. A 400-lumen pencil beam and a 400-lumen wall of light behave completely differently in a tent.

• Spot beams throw a narrow, intense column. Brilliant for picking out a path, a cairn or a fence line on a night descent. Miserable for camp, because you get tunnel vision and have to sweep the beam around like a searchlight to find your stove.
• Flood beams spread light widely and softly. Perfect for cooking, pitching, rummaging in a pack, reading in a bothy and not blinding whoever is sitting opposite you. Hopeless for seeing three hundred metres up a track.
• Hybrid or dual-emitter torches give you both, usually via two LEDs, a sliding lens or a rotating bezel. This is the configuration most hillwalkers end up with, and for good reason.

If you only get one beam, pick a moderately wide one — think 40 to 60 degrees. It will still show you a reasonable stretch of path at walking pace and it will not make you useless the moment you stop moving. A true flood plus a genuinely tight spot covers everything, but a single well-judged middle beam is lighter and simpler.

Battery life, cold and the rechargeable question

Runtime figures are quoted at the lowest setting, which is rarely the mode you use. Look at the third or fourth column down in the specs: high modes often drop from full brightness to a dim glow within 20 to 40 minutes, then limp along for hours. That step-down is thermal and deliberate, not a fault.

In practice, a healthy evening’s use — an hour of cooking and pottering, another hour of reading, plus a night walk — costs somewhere around 100 to 200 lumen-hours. A torch that gives you 250 lumens for two hours and 30 lumens for twenty is a far more useful tool than one that claims 1,000 lumens for a minute.

• Alkaline cells lose capacity fast below freezing. Fine for summer, disappointing in a February bothy.
• Lithium AAA or AA hold up much better in the cold and are worth the extra cost for winter trips.
• Rechargeable NiMH or lithium-ion are cheap per hour and reliable, but remember that a bothy has no sockets. Carry a power bank or a spare cell.
• USB-rechargeable torches with sealed, non-replaceable batteries are wonderfully convenient until the cell ages. If you go down this route, keep a tiny backup torch in your pack.

Whichever you choose, carry spare cells in an inside pocket. A torch that lives in a cold top-lid pocket is a torch that fades early.

Weight, fit and the grams you notice

Head torches range from about 25 grams to well over 200. A sub-40g torch is barely there and perfectly adequate for three-season bothy life. A 90 to 120g torch with a rear-mounted battery feels more balanced than its weight suggests, because the mass sits at the back of your skull rather than pulling your forehead down.

Fit matters as much as mass. Look for a wide, elasticated headband with a silicone strip inside, and a torch body that tilts through at least 60 degrees so you can point light at your hands rather than the horizon. If you wear a hood or a hat, test that the band still sits comfortably over it. Check that the switch works with gloves on — small recessed buttons are infuriating in the cold, and a lock function that prevents accidental switch-on in your pack is genuinely valuable.

Aim for at least IPX4 water resistance for rain and splashes; IPX7 if you plan to wade or swim in upland tarns with the torch on your head.

Red light, moonlight modes and bothy manners

Most decent torches now include a red LED, a low white mode around one to five lumens, or both. Red light preserves your night vision and is far kinder to a bothy full of sleeping people. So is a moonlight mode, which gives you enough glow to find the door, your boots or the loo without waking anyone.

Two habits make you a good bothy companion: angle the beam down and keep it off other people’s faces, and switch to your lowest useful setting rather than blasting the room. If you are sharing a small space, a torch you can hang from a nail or a beam on its lowest setting beats a bright head torch every time.

Matching the torch to your trip

For summer wild camping and lower-level bothy trips, a 50 to 70g hybrid torch with a good flood, a red mode and AAA or built-in rechargeable power is plenty. For winter, night navigation and long approaches, step up to something around 100 to 120g that takes replaceable cells and can genuinely throw 80 to 100 metres.

Whatever you buy, test it properly before you rely on it: go for a walk after dark, cook a meal wearing it with gloves on, and check how the light behaves when you sit down and read. Standardise your spare cells across torch, GPS and headlamp where you can, so one set of spares covers everything. And pack a 20g backup — it weighs nothing and it has saved more than one very dark walk off a hill.