Photo essay, TGO - Bothies

Bothies

Photo essay

Gimme

shelter David Lintern pays tribute to the work of the Mountain Bothies Association, keepers of the humble mountain doss

Bothies photo essay

ABOVE Fords of Avon bothy, Cairngorms National Park.

Definitely more of a shed than a fully-fledged building, this was recently rebuilt to match an older structure.

PREVIOUS PAGES Shenavall in Fisherfield, once known as the Whitbread Wilderness. Just up the glen is the most remote point in mainland UK, if measured by distance from a metalled road.

The Mountain Bothies Association

celebrates its 50th birthday this year. It has been duly honoured with the Queen’s Award for Voluntary Service, a tribute to the graft, craft and ingenuity that’s required to keep around 100 buildings afloat, tiny ships adrift in lonely seas of bog and heather, places that exist against the odds. For me, the real reason to celebrate bothies is not a birthday, or a merit badge from Her Maj’, but for a love of stories and preservation of ethics.

The bothy code is a code for life. Turn no-one away, leave no trace, respect each other and the place you stay in. Not ‘rules’, but an appeal to that rarest of elements in the modern periodic table – empathy. A wistful reminder of mountain ethics in an age of dumbingdown and GoPro drones, but the romantic in us kens it: these ideas are fit to guide our wider 38 The Great Outdoors August 2015

life, not just for taking shelter in the wilds.

A bothy stay will warm hands, but can also warm hearts and even save lives.

Thankfully I’ve never arrived at death’s door, but I have fallen through the door at Corrour drenched and dehydrated, to find a fire already burning and a chair already waiting. Camban bothy is a favourite, purely because it saved a friend new to Scottish hillwalking from what might have become hypothermia. Fortunes change under a roof and four walls – even if the only running water is running down the walls, and the roof is shared with mice. These buildings are also places to share with new friends and old, and a gentler introduction for those new to big, wide-open spaces.

I used to vaguely disapprove of bothies, their nod to creature comforts where I thought

there should be no concessions. But as my understanding of our backcountry has deepened, I’ve grown to love them, not as intrusions, but part of the landscape story.

Bothies offer a link to our natural and cultural history, fragments of past lives lived.

By visiting, writing in the bothy book and meeting like-minded souls, we make the story new. A bothy book is my favourite kind of reading – episodic, as much about what’s absent as what’s present, accents unique, each voice given equal measure. Funny, stupid, poignant, pointless and poetic – all of life is here, the pages of an enormous novel thrown to the wind, each character given permission to run riot in the hills outside.

ABOVE Meanach Bothy in the heart of Glen Nevis, a welcome billet after hours of wading through the mire on a recent coast-to-coast trip.

LEFT Bothies are serendipitous meeting places for other wandering souls, from all walks of life.

These guys were from America, and Corrour was their first bothy experience.

More information about the MBA: mountainbothies.org.uk August 2015 The Great Outdoors 39

Bothies photo essay

RIGHT Necessity is the mother of invention in many bothy builds – this is the mouse-proof shelf in Gameshope bothy, Borders.

RIGHT Guirdil, on the north of Rum, cleared for sheep by the MacLeans of Coll in 1826, still grazed by goats and deer.

below Culra bothy, currently off limits due to asbestos discovered in the roof, dwarfed by an early morning inversion in the Pattack strath. It’s not necessarily about the building – it’s about the location!

BELOW The view from the ‘airlock’ in the CIC hut, under the north face of Nevis. This is not strictly speaking a bothy – it’s managed by the Scottish Mountaineering Club – but is probably the king of mountain dosses in the UK.

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Bothies photo essay

RIGHT A winter Corbett-bagging weekend with one old friend and one new, Lairig Leachach was our doss for the first night. Stefan’s 15-year-old Bowmore was superb!

ABOVE Perhaps Scotland’s best-known bothy, Corrour in the Lairig Ghru has recently had a compostable loo installed to help alleviate some of the impact.

RIGHT A warm welcome awaits in Rum’s Dibidil bothy, once the home of shepherd ‘Johnny come over’, his wife and six children. A superb island location with views over to Eigg.

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LEFT ‘Ode to Ainsley’. All of life is congregated in the bothy book!

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