GALLOWAY
Our deputy editor spends her first night in a mountain shelter, the first MBA bothy no less. But deep in the Galloway Forest Park things aren’t quite as they first seem….
The ethos of bothying is wonderfully romantic and appealing. Free accommodation for all, in the most remote and wild parts of the country. Away from the noise, constraints and madness of society, where everyone is equal and welcome (so long as they adhere to the Bothy Code of course).
It’s a way back to a beautiful simplicity of survival, providing emergency shelter to mountain-goers in bad weather, as well as enabling free access to overnight adventures in the hills for everyone from weathered mountaineers to fresh-faced Scouts. The buildings themselves benefit too, with Mountain Bothy Association volunteers maintaining over 100 shelters that would otherwise be deserted, saving them from disuse and dereliction.
What’s not to love?
This magazine has held a long and deeply embedded fondness for these wild shelters. But despite the many fabulous reasons to go bothying, I personally had never slept in one.
Perhaps more by accident than design (or is that the other way around?), in my 20-odd years of walking in the hills, I had opted for tents or cosy (some might say more luxurious) lodgings. Yes, it’s true, I do have a liking for a king-sized bed and a deep bath. But I do also love the wild. And so the appeal of a remote bothy, in a beautiful location, lit up by a roaring fire, was undeniable.
My time had come, and it seemed only fitting that in homage to the honourable history of the Mountain Bothy Association, my first night in a bothy should be in the first ever MBA bothy.
Beginnings of bothying
Bothying first began in the post-WWII era. Hill farming had been declining since the 1920s and improved transport and machinery meant that estates could access the land more remotely. Returning servicemen also began to move out of the hills to more centralised locations for better living conditions, and so many farmsteads and buildings were left abandoned. As the numbers of walkers and cyclists increased the buildings slowly started to be used for overnight accommodation, sometimes secretly but increasingly with the owners’ knowledge. And so, bothying became a ‘thing’.
As the numbers using bothies grew, the state of some of them deteriorated, with only a few regularly maintained by climbing clubs. It was an entry in the Backhill of the Bush bothy book, suggesting that a group be set up to save bothies from ruin, that led to the formation of the MBA in 1965. That summer the ruins of Tunskeen farmhouse in Galloway Forest Park became its first renovation project, led by Bernard Heath with the help of some Civil Defen
