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