From dog-sledding to saunas: nine winter adventures in the UK | United Kingdom holidays

Sauna and a swim on the Dorset coast

Tara and I are happily glowing when our sauna host, Sarah, enters with a bucket of birch water and a tea towel. Tara is sitting on the top level of the sauna, squinting out of a small window at the bright Dorset coast and the seaweed-slippery sea we’ve just come from, while I am down a rung, where the heat is milder. Sarah is beaded with sweat, her eyes bright blue above a deep smile. She emanates the kind of wellness that can make those around her feel a bit blessed, which is ideal as what I am doing here is a kind of worship: of water, friendship, the sea and the seasons. Swimming can be a non-liturgical service, a naked exchange between you and the planet where words fall away and you drop back into the world as if you belong.

Today, we’re ramping up the winter swim experience and drawing it out by introducing some heat – why this has been missing for so long from the English winter swimming scene in all its stoic forebearance, I don’t know, but I thank the swim gods that it is here now. We have run between the sauna and the sea for a while now and are a long way into our hot-cold-hot-cold sauna-swim journey. I feel like human honey: all warm, smooth contentment and peace.

Sarah kneels to put some more wood in the burner and ladles the birch water (literally water with birch leaves) on to the big caged rock mass that is throwing out heat. She invites us to close our eyes,…