Scottish Bothy Walks - 28 best bothy adventures

BOTHIES & BOTHYING
‘A simple shelter in remote
country for the use and benefit
of all who love being in wild and
lonely places’.
Definition from the MBA members’ handbook
Scotland’s bothies are a loose collection of
shepherds’ cottages, estate houses and
abandoned crofts that have been saved
from ruin and renovated. They form a network of
basic shelters located throughout the country’s
most remote and uninhabited regions. Freely
available for anyone to use as a lunch stop, or
to stay in overnight, bothies have been used by
mountaineers and stravaigers for well over a
hundred years and become integral to Scotland’s
outdoor culture.
In very simple terms, there are many derelict
properties scattered across the Scottish
landscape because of the waves of depopulation
that began in the mid- to late-18th century and
did not ease until after World War II. The initial
driving force behind the exodus was a process
of forced evictions known as the ‘Highland
Clearances’. People then continued to abandon
their communities when harvest failures led to
illness and famine, with many leaving for the
industrial heartland that grew rapidly in Lowland
Scotland through the Victorian era.
The term bothy derives from the Gaelic bothan
(via the Old Irish both) meaning hut, and originally
described rough-and-ready accommodation
provided by landowners for farm labourers or
estate workers. More recently the term has
become synonymous with an idea of sanctuary
and shelter. This cultural transition began in the
1930s, with the rise in popularity of hillwalking
among the urban populations of Glasgow,
Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Short of money, but
with more leisure time on their hands, groups
of mainly young men used these partly derelict
cottages as places to congregate and sleep for
free during hard-earned weekends. In some cases
this practice was clandestine, but increasingly,
various estates gave their tacit consent.
The rural exodus following World War II left an
increasing number of farmhouses unoccupied,
and walkers simply started using them as
somewhere to stay overnight. By the 1960s,
however, the fabric of many of these properties
began to suffer through misuse and lack of
maintenance. A few were cared for by climbing
clubs, but the remainder received little attention.
I strongly believe the bothy tradition in its
current form would not have endured without
the invention of the MBA, which came into
existence in 1965. Bernard Heath, a keen cyclist
and hillwalker was inspired by a chance remark
in a bothy book suggesting the establishment
of a club to keep bothies in good repair. He and
a few of his friends decided to restore the ruins
of Tunskeen Farm in Galloway, and the following
November a group of like-minded individuals
gathered in nearby Dalmellington village hall
where the Mountain Bothies Association was
born. During the next five decades the MBA
extended its renovation work across the country,
as well as taking over the upkeep of many bothies
maintained by various climbing clubs. Today
there are over 80 MBA bothies in Scotland as
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