Author tackles notion that Scotland's bothies are attracting the 'wrong sort'

Kat Hill

William Collins, £16.99

Review by Susan Flockhart

They have no WiFi, electricity, running water or even beds. Devoid of creature comforts, they are situated in remote, lonely places accessible only by the hardiest hikers. Yet it seems mountain bothies have become chi-chi tourist destinations, with even the upmarket Conde Nast Traveller promoting them as “perfect place[s] to pitch up in the wild”.

Once a term for a farm labourers’ abode, “bothy” now usually denotes a temporary shelter frequented by hillwalkers, often requisitioned from an abandoned building by the Mountain Bothies Association (MBA) and governed by a voluntary code requiring users to look after the place and respect fellow visitors.

Of late, however, some of these rudimentary shelters have become magnets for stag parties and ne’er-do-wells, with one landowner complaining that over-publicity through social media and guides such as The Scottish Bothy Bible have “sucked in the wrong sort of person”.

So what is the “right” kind of person? Kat Hill wouldn’t call herself a hardcore bothier. Neither an outdoor expert nor a Munroist, she admits that as “a temporary interloper into the Highlands”, she occasionally feels nervous on approach, wondering who’ll be her overnight companions and whether her gear will pass muster among seasoned mountaineers.

Yet the Oxford University academic turned author loves these offbeat boltholes and her new book reads partly as a paeon to their charms. It’s also part-memoir, describing Hill’s personal journey as she hikes through wild and sometimes desolate territory to a dozen bothies (all Scottish, bar one). Having experienced the collapse of her marriage, a subsequent “destructive” relationship with someone she describes as a narcissist and then endured “the macabre carousel of dating apps”, her book’s subtitle hints at her search for emotional, as well as physical, refuge.

At Cadderlie, a former shepherd’s cottage on Loch Etive’s shore, Hill finds convivial company and a hearthside sing-song amid the musty reek of damp firewood and sodden outdoor gear (aka “bottled scent of bothy”). In Guirdil on Rum, she spends an evening sipping whisky with the bothy’s sole other resident and at Penrhos Isaf in North Wales, she arrives to find the place empty but feels comforted by human traces left by previous inhabitants, from drips of candlewax to helpfully stashed kindling.

In the Cairngorms, however, after trekking through the Lairig Ghru mountain pass, she is disappointed to find that Corrour, Scotland’s oldest and most famous bothy, is already full. Whether those inside are drunken revellers or snooty Munro-baggers, Hill doesn’t say, though she notes that “unusually for bothiers, people aren’t that friendly” before pitching her tent beneath the stars.

She also fails to gain entry at a chock-full “secret howff”: one of those places whose closely guarded locations are shared through nods and winks among a “sacrosanct inner circle”. Hill respects the call to secrecy, revealing only that the howff is somewhere “within the hidden folds of Gleann an t’Slugain” (in the Cairngorms). Yet she is clearly troubled by the exclusionary nature of such conventions.

At the heart of her book is a celebration of the sense of commonality and community she finds in bothies. At the Bothy Project’s Sweeney’s on Eigg, which offers week-long artists’ residencies for half the year, she enjoys the cabin’s bijou comforts and revels in its scenic location, a “miraculous, weather-hewn place of granite and sea”.

Yet any hopes she might “retreat into the wild and then sit down and write endless pages of beautiful prose” are dashed. Hill feels “discouragingly unproductive” at Sweeney’s and questions the notion that isolation breeds creativity. Rather, the creative inspiration she finds in bothies is born of “connection and collaboration”.

Amid the comings and goings of strangers and the whiff of peaty socks, “lots of people suddenly become impromptu poets or artists when presented with the blank space of the bothy book”. As evidence, she includes a joyful selection of the sketches, poems and experiences recorded in these rough-hewn visitor books, which together offer a fascinating glimpse into the history of public access to the great outdoors.

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Corrour’s bothy books date back to 1928 – a period that’s been called the “great proletarian revolution” of hillwalking, when working-class people from the cities began exploring vast, beautiful landscapes that had hitherto (at least since the Highland Clearances) been the exclusive terrain of the wealthy.

Hill, who grew up in Shropshire but now lives north of the Border, offers a brief history of Scottish land-ownership, observing that our comparatively liberal right-to-roam laws are hard-won and that, with 1.7 million hectares held by just 87 landowners, “the MBA has always had to negotiate with estates” for permission to use bothies.

And as she discovers, such permissions can be rescinded. Peanmeanach, a traditional but-and-ben that once housed the schoolmistress of a now abandoned village on the Ardnish peninsula, offers spectacular views to Ardnamurchan and Eigg. But when Hill visits, she learns that the old cottage is shortly to become a holiday rental, after too many “Covidiots” (in one newspaper’s words) piled in for parties.

Now bookable at £59 per night, Peanmeanach is run not-for-profit by the Ardnish Estate and Hill accepts that “the reclamation of the bothy is not a simple story of profiteering and privatisation”. Yet while debates rage about so-called over-tourism and the impact of hordes of visitors on once-deserted beauty spots, she bristles at any suggestion ordinary folk don’t know how to look after the land, arguing that access to nature has never mattered more and that we should be wary of “narratives that quietly turn back long histories of … often working-class freedoms for space”.

She also ponders the meaning of “wilderness”, the nature of nostalgia and the merits of so-called eco-tourism, offering evocative (but never overblown) descriptions of the landscapes she traverses on her journey from bothy greenhorn to passionate advocate for the right to roam. Bothy offers an intelligent, enjoyable and highly original examination of humankind’s relationship with the land, and with each other.