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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
