The Book of the Bothy

Preface

From sea to forest, beach to mountain, this assortment of 26 bothies represents a snapshot of what’s out there in some of Britain’s wildest areas – hopefully enough to whet your appetite and make you want to go and check them out for yourself. It was never my intention to produce a catalogue of all the bothies out there, instead I wanted to provide a big enough selection for everyone to find a bothy that was not too far away, so that you could actually go and stay there. Conversely, I didn’t want too large a spread so that there were no new ones for you to discover yourself – that is, after all, the joy of bothying.

The initial basis of the selection was geographical – I don’t think anyone would have wanted to read about 26 bothies all within the same mountain range. But within that, it was a personal choice – bothies, much like mountain summits or waterproof jackets, are subjective. One that I might rate highly, others may never want to stay at. The result is a selection in which each bothy offers something slightly different, be it back-story, structure, size or views from the window.

Some bothies described here set the scene for some of the most memorable nights of my life and, as such, are just too good to keep to myself. Other bothies are included because I want more eyes on them – more good people looking out for them so that they remain for years to come. So I share them here, hoping that, like me, you’ll discover the magic that bothies can create.

You may disagree with my selection – but that’s half the fun. So go forth, find your favourite bothy, share your own adventure in the book you find inside it, and then tell me which bothy you would have included. You can get in touch through Cicerone’s Facebook and twitter. I can’t wait to hear from you all...

Phoebe Smith, 2015

Strathchailleach (aka Sandy’s Bothy) nestles in the hills beyond Sandwood Bay

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the wonderful world of bothying

Something I love about this bothy, and every bothy, is how a network of adventurers and travellers is created through these pages. We may never meet. David, Owen and their friends who stayed here on the 5th October may never meet the famous Izzy and Rose who stayed here from 1–3 October, but there’s a connection there... something happened between them, even though separated by time, they are united by place.

Entry in Grwyne Fawr bothy book, by ’Hannah’, 2013

My face appeared orange in the light of the flame. The flickering glow of a dying candle fizzed and spat as I leafed through the pages of a bothy book – the visitors’ log that’s placed in each and every shelter from the far north of Scotland to the forested valley of mid-Wales which makes up the bothy network. I was, at the particular moment, not really aware of my surroundings. Wasn’t taking in the view of the creeping valley at my window as a thin sliver of a river hewed its way through the undergrowth and tipped into the dam below it. Didn’t register the shrill hoot of a brown owl on the hunt in the clear sky above my little slate roof. Instead I was lost among the pages of this tome, caught in a space between time by Hannah’s words, meeting new people in the ink within the lines of paper. This is the power of the bothy book, and of the bothy itself – this ability for visitors to simultaneously find and lose themselves, to meet and connect with other people in a way that they never could in an office or house surrounded by mod cons and mobile phone reception.

But first, perhaps, I should rewind. I was in a bothy – a mountain hut that’s completely free to use as an overnight stop, positioned in a wild and stunning location. Somewhere you could go and stay tomorrow and not pay a penny for the privilege.

I know all too well how novel the idea of a bothy can sound to the uninitiated. The notion that landowners, who will make no money from it, will leave one of their buildings unlocked for walkers, climbers or outdoor enthusiasts to sleep in can sound bizarre. Furthermore, when you learn that an organisation regularly raises money to maintain these buildings and furnishes them with basics like a fireplace or stove, a table and a visitors’ book, it seems even more outlandish. But that’s exactly what the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA) – a donation-funded and volunteer-run organisation which has just celebrated its 50th anniversary – does to this day.

Bothies have a knack of bringing out both the best and the worst in people. Don’t believe me? Head to a popular one, close to a city, on a Monday night, and you might, if you’re unlucky, find piles of rubbish on the sleeping platforms, questionable yellow liquid in bottles above the fireplace and a visitors’ book filled with senseless scrawl. But, equally, there’s not another place in the world I can name where I’ve arrived in a storm, uninvited, and instantly been offered dry clothes, the comfiest armchair closest to the fire (forcing someone else to stand), and warm food and drink I didn’t bring myself.

Two extremes? Definitely. But I stand by my assertion that something happens to us when we venture into the wild, the remote, the isolated. Social barriers break down, we have time to think, time to reflect, and the opportunity to do things right – not through fear of being punished if we don’t, but because we get a feeling so good from doing them that we want to do them more and more. And it’s in those places that you’ll find bothies.

Until five years ago the MBA didn’t publish locations of their bothies online – they remained a secret for members and those in the know. But word got out, as it always does, and so they decided it was time to share them. Some disagree with the idea – think that it’s best that few people know their whereabouts because they operate within a system of trust. There’s nothing to stop someone ruining them for others.

Given that, you might wonder why I too have decided to publish details of some of these shelters myself in this book. The reason is simple – I want more eyes on them, more eyes to watch over them and keep them safe. The kind of person hell-bent on destroying a bothy is certainly not going to bother with a book when they can find the location of just about any bothy in the country with a quick search on Google.

Warm fires and mountain adventures are shared by candlelight

The kind of person I want to tell about bothies is you. I want to invite you all to fall in love with these modest shelters as much as I have. I want to share the information I know about them, want to help you reach them the best way possible, would like you to be prepared for staying at them and, finally, I want to take you on a journey to visit them over the next couple of hundred pages so that, even if you don’t get chance to visit them all, you’ll feel like you have.

As the wise Hannah said – we may never meet, but through these bothies we will be connected, a network of travellers and adventurers created through these pages.

What are bothies?

The easiest way to describe bothies is simply as stone tents. They may look like country cottages from the outside – pretty enough, with a ramshackle type of charm to earn them a spot on chocolate boxes – but inside it’s a different story. With no gas, no electric, no running water, no bathroom, no beds and certainly no TV, these are as basic a shelter as they come. But it’s amazing what a few candles, a lit fire and good cheer can do to a place.

In terms of size, bothies range from two-person shed-like affairs right up to multi-bedroom house-like structures with several fireplaces and even kitchen areas. There isn’t a standard bothy – they will constantly surprise you – but therein lies their charm.

Best of all they are left unlocked on a trust basis, for wilderness lovers to stay in, so that we might linger in the places we love so well. It’s funny how somewhere so basic that it wouldn’t even make a hotel grading system can be a place with views that are definitely five star.

Where can I find them?

Bothies can be found all over Britain in wild and remote places. Because of this, most are found in Scotland – arguably home to the wildest tracts of land in mainland Britain – with a few scattered in the north of England and parts of rural Wales.

To give you an idea of their distribution, the MBA has around 100 buildings in its care, of which just eight are in Wales (where the MBA is known as the CLLM) and 10 in England. The selection of bothies in this book reflects this northern bias.

History of bothies

Chatas, Alpenvereinshütten, cabins, wilderness huts, backcountry bunks – even if you’ve never stayed at a British bothy you will probably have heard of one of their foreign cousins. So the idea of staying out in the mountains or wild hinterland is certainly not a new one.

Glencoul, in Sutherland, is just one of the many bothies in Scotland that is ideally placed beside a loch

The Swiss Alpine Club has built huts for climbers and walkers since 1863, offering refuge and respite for those far from civilization. The Appalachian Mountain Club in North America constructed its first backcountry shelter in 1888. And places around the world from Norway to New Zealand, and from Poland to Patagonia, are home to a network of cabins that provide a bed for the night for weary travellers.

Where the bothies in Britain differ is that they were never built for that purpose, but rather were appropriated when that need arose. Originally old farmsteads or workers’ huts, they existed because employees on big remote estates, or those quarrying or building dams deep in the mountains, needed somewhere to rest or stay nearby – a commute would have been impossible.

However, the arrival of cheaper vehicles, agricultural machinery and greater transport links meant there was no longer a need for people to reside in these far-flung corners of the country. One by one they began to leave their homesteads behind, quarrying fell out of demand and workers’ quarters were no longer inhabited.

Around the same time, in the 1930s, came the Great Depression, a time when industrial workers’ hours were becoming shorter, giving the working classes more leisure time but little money to spend on it. Most of them were stuck in factories during the hours they did work, and longed to escape the cities. Naturally the mountains were calling. Mass trespasses began to take place – famously in the English Peak District on Kinder Scout, but also beyond – by which men and women demanded their right to roam in the empty swathes of land that surrounded them. Climbing clubs cropped up all over the country, but especially in Scotland, and more specifically Glasgow, where the famous Creagh Dhu club was formed in Clydebank.

Hutchison Memorial Hut in the Cairngorms is popular with climbers

For its members, getting into these wild spaces was more than just a hobby, it was what they needed to enable them to survive working in industrialised urban environments for the remaining five (or more) days each week. Putting on shared buses or, more often, hitchhiking, once they got where they needed to go, short on money, they would sleep wherever they could – in barns, under rocky overhangs (known as howffs), in caves and in these abandoned bothies, and they taught themselves to live off the land, so that they could be close to the crags the next day.

This spawned some of the most famous climbers of the 20th century – from Jimmy Bell (who put up a host of new routes on Ben Nevis and edited the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal for an impressive 24 years) to WH Murray, author of Mountaineering in Scotland (first penned on toilet paper when Murray was a prisoner of war during the Second World War, it was destroyed by his captors, to which he retaliated by writing it again and finally – triumphantly – getting it published in 1947), and Don Whillans (working-class hero, incredible climber, gear inventor and renowned deliverer of the one-liner). For men such as these, bothies were key to enabling them to get into the countryside and stay on the doorstep of the peaks.

In the years after the Second World War society’s attitude to the outdoors and, more specifically, outdoor activities was changing too. Soldiers and their families looked to camping as a cheap holiday, and more and more people were discovering that walking was a therapeutic way to spend their increasing free time.

Some more intrepid walkers and mountaineers began to explore their own country’s wild corners, and as they did, those other than climbers stumbled upon these abandoned buildings. Giving them a convenient start point for a mountain ascent, walk or crag climb the following day, many began to stay the night in them – sometimes with and sometimes without the landowner’s consent. And thus the modern day bothy-er was born.

But an ill-maintained building can survive only so long, and soon many of these bothies crumbled into ruin. Some were adopted by climbing clubs that knew of their importance; others were lucky enough to have landowners who privately maintained them for outdoor enthusiasts and local shepherds. But many others were left abandoned. And so they would have remained were it not for one man, Bernard Heath. It was he who, back in 1965, got together with a group of friends to repair and restore the old farm building in Dumfries and Galloway now known as Tunskeen bothy. Later that year a group of like-minded bothy-lovers joined forces, and the Mountain Bothies Association we know and love was formed.

Toilets in or near bothies are a welcome addition – but should by no means be expected!

Membership grew (as did bothy projects), Maintenance Officers (MOs) were appointed in the 1970s, in 1975 the charity was officially registered, in 1991 Bernard and Betty Heath were honoured with a British Empire Medal for their work and in 2015 the MBA won the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service.

Changes may have taken place over the years, with health and safety legislation being addressed, complaints procedures being established and company status being updated. But its purpose remains unchanged. Some 100 bothies, over 3000 members, regular work parties and 50 years later, the volunteer-run organisation is still working hard with landowners to preserve and restore ’open shelters for the use and enjoyment of all who love wild and lonely places’. And thank goodness they do.

The association’s founders once wrote that: ’Members’ only reward will be the knowledge that their efforts