Looking at the matter in reverse by recalling camps that have stayed memorable after many years:
Slopes not to be so extreme that you slide out of your sleeping bag / tent / both during the night.
Absence of enormous clumps of grass / thistles spaced at centres that make it inevitable that at least three lie beneath your tent be it an ever so tiny tent.
Sufficient depth of soil to get pegs in - one camp turned out to be a veneer of soil over a former army parade ground - had to place the pgs in at 10 degrees to the horizontal.
Absence of moles - on a French site friend in next tnet could be heard thrashing around in the nights as he kept being woken up for reasons unknown - when we struck tents to leave, turned out eight or ten mole hills had risen beneath his tent during our one week stay - and there were no mole hills anywhere else on the site...
Absence of Culicodes heliophilus and C.impunctatus*
Sufficiently firm entry to the site off the road that it does not become necessary for every single vehicle to be towed out by a tractor after a weekend of rain.
No throbing portable generators run by some inconsiderate campers (there will be a special place in one of the innermost circles of the inferno awaiting them
).
Absence of airport runway on the other side of the boundary fence - we arrived late at night to blissful silence and were awoken at dawn by the first jet of the day passing about twenty feet above our tent
Absence of a enormous gathering of mods in the next field who spent the weekend incinerating plastic and other noxious materials and accumulating many skip'sworths of empty cans in an all-day-all-night drinking and quarrelling orgy
Absence of the heaviest rainstorm of the last couple of decades, resulting in water deep enough to submerge a mess tin
inside the tent and a friend floating about on an airbed inside his tent
Strange how the nice pleasant campsites blur from accurate recall whilst the ghastly campsites stand out for ever in perfect, horrifying detail....
* The much-feared Scottish midge.
