A rickle of stones in the middle of nowhere – no power, no inside lavvy, no insulation, no comforts – what a draughty hole! But it can be a lifesaver nonetheless.
People have touched Scotland more widely than we realise. The impression we leave on the landscape is deep and long-lasting, yet our footprints aren’t so widespread as they once were. Our ancestors trod lightly – but they lived and worked in places which we dismiss today as being marginal, or downright wilderness. Walking in the hills, miles beyond the nearest roadend, you sometimes come across a lush patch of grass, with the odd plant which has escaped from cultivation, and the faint outline of some founds, or even a drunken gable end collapsing into the hillside.
This might be a long-abandoned croft, gamekeeper’s house or shepherd’s cottage, which was once in use all year round. Alternatively, it was a mountain shiel, where herders stayed in the short Scottish summer as their sheep and cattle roamed the unfenced mountain pastures. Although it may have only had one window and one fireplace, that was enough to support people for three or four months of the year. However, thanks to intensive agriculture, few crofts survive today above 1500 ft (500m) – the growing season is too short, and the winters too harsh. The soil is usually too poor for arable crops, and the land is out of reach of the knackers’ float, and the vet’s Land Rover – as a result, unimproved pasture high up in the glens has been abandoned by cattle and sheep and reverted to wild species.
That land may still be used for grouse shooting and deer stalking, but nowadays the shooting parties rarely overnight on the hill, thus the hunting lodges they used are also redundant. Once, the lodges were well-appointed, with stone walls, a slated roof and a rake of outbuildings; a good example is Féith Uaine, located at the watershed of the Tilt, Feshie and Geldie, and better known to hillwalkers as the Tarf Hotel. Although it is probably the remotest building in Scotland, a five hour trek from the nearest roadend, it once had several rooms, each with tongued-and-grooved timber linings, and even a boiler and a heating system.
At some point after the Second World War, the estate factor locked the door, and the lodge was “mothballed”. In reality, this meant that it was abandoned, as the costs of maintaining a building in the midst of a wilderness are high, particularly if there is no return to be had from it. So it is that a whole class of buildings – croft houses, hunting lodges, shielings, shepherds’ huts – in the high glens of the Grampians, Cairngorms and other upland areas has become surplus to requirements, and has evolved in an interesting way.
When a building falls out of use, architecture’s fourth dimension becomes apparent. The fabric of the walls – stone bonded with lime mortar – begins to absorb water, as there is no heat to drive it off. Pointing falls out, and rainwater tracks through the cracks which appear. The wee leaks in the roof, now unchecked, all join hands and bgin to rot the sarking boards. The nails holding the slates on rust away, and the roof becomes “nail sick”. All of these are fixable in the meantime, and it may take half a century, but the unmaintained building will fail – the roof will eventually collapse, and the wallheads left exposed will be eroded, until the building ceases to provide the most basic human requirement: shelter. After that, the boulder rickle offers nothing more than a windbreak in the wilds.
Happily, the decline of marginal agriculture, and the shift in the pattern of field sports, happened at the same time as hillwalking became a mass pursuit. Abandoned buildings are used by climbers and mountaineers as overnight stops, and bases for expeditions, as well as waypoints and temporary shelters. Conscientious groups like the Mountain Bothies Association look after these places, many of which belong to someone else, making sure they’re kept in good repair in rather the same spirit as each traveller adds a stone to a roadside cairn, so that it will be high enough to act as a landmark for anyone caught on the track in a storm. There is a powerful sense of society at work, since the work they do comes for free, and everyone in the hillwalking fraternity benefits from it.
These places are known generically as bothies – the term used to mean a ploughman’s cottar house, or a mess room in a factory, but is now in universal use as a hill shelter. Through the development of these places into this new use, a new vernacular has developed. The original hunting lodge or shieling may have been built and maintained using materials carried in on a train of hill ponies – today, we use a mixture of as found materials, and man-made products light enough to be carried in over the hill, or sometimes delivered by helicopter. The rubble stonework, and sand and water from the nearby burn are easy to locate – the lime may be dug from a pit on the hill, if you’re located in the right geology.
Roofing may well be corrugated iron or aluminium, the most lightweight of the prefabricated cladding sheets – this mirrors the development of “technical” clothing for mountaineers. The tweed and dubbined leather of the pre-High Tech era has been replaced by breathable waterproofs, fibrepile jackets and windproof fleeces. It’s another example of the strange, paradoxical relationship we have with the wilderness: we want it to remain wild and natural, but at the same time we wish to conquer it on our own terms. The bothy remains spartan inside (although it may have a wood-burning stove and timber sleeping platforms), yet it’s a world away from bedding down on the heather with a plaid wrapped around you, and in winter, the bothy is a lifeboat.
When snowstorms lash the trackless wastes, visibility is zero, and windchill takes the temperature down to minus twenty – no amount of personal equipment will save you, only four walls and a stout roof. You will perish through exposure long before lack of water, sleep or food will do for you, which is why the bothy is so well appreciated by hypothermic mountaineers as much as parties of summer ramblers. The bothy, as it did for the shepherd, stalker and crofter, provides shelter where otherwise there would be none.
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