Big bothy walk
When Juls Stodel set out to spend a night in each of the 104 shelters cared for by the Mountain Bothies Association, she sought kinship and adventure. She did not expect to discover the ghosts of who she could have been in another lifetime...
ON ARRIVING at a small stone house, you will question how anyone ever lived here. On building the fire, you will wonder why they ever did. Perhaps a stranger will stumble in as the sun begins to set and you will greet each other, commenting how you haven’t seen another soul since maybe the day before yesterday. The two of you will rummage in your bags, one will pass a bottle of whisky, the other will present a pack of cards. You will talk, perhaps you will laugh and share stories. Maybe your new companion came in from the north tonight whilst you approached from the west, both aiming for this small, stone house in the middle of nowhere.
In the morning, you will clear the ashes and sweep the floor, carrying out the empty bottles and tealight shells in your bag. You will both sign your name in a logbook, and never see each other again. You will just be someone they met once in a bothy in the middle of nowhere.
AN IMPULSE ARISES
In June 2022 I ended my lease, packed my belongings into a Manchester storage unit and set off to wander for a while with an aim to stay the night at all 104 bothies under the guardianship of the Mountain Bothies Association. This wasn’t the result of years of careful planning; it had been just over a month between the idea forming and me starting. Why? I’ve yet to give anyone – least of all myself – a satisfactory answer. Why not?
I began in the borders on the day of the Platinum Jubilee, when bunting swung across Hawick high street and a band played somewhere out of sight. I didn’t know then how long it would take; there wasn’t a set approach or some elegant existing trail to link them. Only one other person, Stephen Pern, had visited all these bothies in one journey before, placing hooks in each one. I decided early in my impulsive planning that this was not going to be a thru-hike – it would be a collection of routes that each linked several bothies, which I could then connect through whatever way I wanted. I could walk, but I would usually take a bus or hitchhike. I did not want to become miserable by restricting myself to a footbound rule when tracking miles was neither the motivation nor the goal. The goal was the bothies, and the motivation was everything about them that I loved.
